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Title: The Love Affairs of Lord Byron
Author: Gribble, Francis Henry
Language: English
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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON
* * * * *
_Works by the Same Author_
MADAME DE STAËL AND HER LOVERS
GEORGE SAND AND HER LOVERS
ROSSEAU AND THE WOMEN HE LOVED
CHATEAUBRIAND AND HIS COURT OF WOMEN
THE PASSIONS OF THE FRENCH ROMANTICS
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Lord Byron._]
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON
by
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
Author of "George Sand and Her Lovers" etc.
London
Eveleigh Nash
Fawside House
1910
PREFACE
Whether a book is called "The Love Affairs of Lord Byron" or "The Life of
Lord Byron" can make very little difference to the contents of its pages.
Byron's love affairs were the principal incidents of his life, and almost
the only ones. Like Chateaubriand, he might have spoke of "a procession of
women" as the great panoramic effect of his career. He differed from
Chateaubriand, however, in the first place, in not professing to be very
much concerned by the pageant, and, in the second place, in being, in
reality, very deeply affected by it. Chateaubriand kept his emotions well
in hand, exaggerating them in retrospect for the sake of literary effect,
picturing the sensibility of his heart in polished phrases, but never
giving the impression of a man who has suffered through his passions, or
been swept off his feet by them, or diverted by them from the pursuit of
ambition or the serene cult of the all-important ego. In all
Chateaubriand's love affairs, in short, red blood is lacking and
self-consciousness prevails. He appears to be equally in love with all the
women in the procession; the explanation being that he is more in love
with himself than with any of them. In spite of the procession of women,
which is admitted to have been magnificent, it may justly be said of
Chateaubriand that love was "of his life a thing apart."
Of Byron, who coined the phrase (though Madame de Staël had coined it
before him) it cannot be said. It may appear to be true of sundry of his
incidental love affairs, but it cannot stand as a broad generalisation.
His whole life was deflected from its course, and thrown out of gear:
first, by his unhappy passion for Mary Chaworth; secondly, by the way in
which women of all ranks, flattering his vanity for the gratification of
their own, importuned him with the offer of their hearts. Lady Byron
herself did so no less than Lady Caroline Lamb, and Jane Clairmont, and
the Venetian light o' loves, though, no doubt, with more delicacy and a
better show of maidenly reserve. Fully persuaded in her own mind that he
had pined for her for two years, she delicately hinted to him that he need
pine no longer. He took the hint and married her, with the catastrophic
consequences which we know. Then other women--a long series of other
women--did what they could to break his fall and console him. He dallied
with them for years, without ever engaging his heart very deeply, until at
last he realised that this sort of dalliance was a very futile and
enervating occupation, tore himself away from his last entanglement, and
crossed the sea to strike a blow for freedom.
That is Byron's life in a nutshell. His biographer, it is clear, has no
way of escape from his love affairs; while the critic is under an
obligation, almost equally compelling, to take note of them. It is not
merely that he was continually writing about them, and that the meaning of
his enigmatic sentences can, in many cases, only be unravelled by the help
of the clue which a knowledge of his love affairs provides. The striking
change which we see the tone of his work undergoing as he grows older is
the reflection of the history of his heart. Many of his later poems might
have been written in mockery of the earlier ones. He had his illusions in
his youth. In his middle-age, if he can be said to have reached
middle-age, he had none, but wrote, to the distress of the Countess
Guiccioli, as a man who delighted to tear aside, with a rude hand, the
striped veil of sentiment and hypocrisy which hid the ugly nakedness of
truth. The secret of that transformation is written in the record of his
love affairs, and can be read nowhere else. His life lacks all unity and
all consistency unless the first place in it is given to that record.
Since the appearance of Moore's Life, and even since the appearance of
Cordy Jeaffreson's "Real Lord Byron," a good deal of new information has
been made available. The biographer has to take cognisance of the various
documents brought together in Mr. Murray's latest edition of Byron's
Writings and Letters; of Hobhouse's "Account of the Separation"; of the
"Confessions," for whatever they may be worth, elicited from Jane
Clairmont and first printed in the _Nineteenth Century_; of Mr. Richard
Edgcumbe's "Byron: the Last Phase"; and of the late Lord Lovelace's
privately printed work, "Astarte."
The importance of each of these authorities will appear when reference is
made to it in the text. It will be seen, then, that some of the Murray
MSS. give precision to the narrative of Byron's relations with Lady
Caroline Lamb, and that others effectually dispose of Cordy Jeaffreson's
theory that Lady Byron's mysterious grievance--the grievance which caused
her lawyer to declare reconciliation impossible--was her husband's
intimacy with Miss Clairmont. Others of them, again, as effectually
confute Cordy Jeaffreson's amazing doctrine that Byron only brought
railing accusations against his wife because he loved her, and that at the
time when he denounced her as "the moral Clytemnestra of thy lord," he was
in reality yearning to be recalled to the nuptial bed. Concerning
"Astarte" some further remarks may be made.
It is a disgusting and calumnious compilation, designed, apparently, to
show that Byron's descendants accept the worst charges preferred against
him by his enemies during his lifetime. Those charges are such that one
would have expected a member of the family to hold his tongue about them,
even if he were in possession of evidence conclusively demonstrating their
truth. That a member of the family should have revived the charges on the
strength of evidence which may justly be described as not good enough to
hang a dog on almost surpasses belief. Still, the thing has been done, and
the biographer's obligations are affected accordingly. Unpleasant though
the subject is, he must examine the so-called evidence for fear lest he
should be supposed to feel himself unable to rebut it; and he is under the
stronger compulsion to do so because the mud thrown by Lord Lovelace is
not thrown at Byron only, but also at Augusta Leigh, a most worthy and
womanly woman, and the best of sisters and wives. It is the hope and
belief of the present writer that he has succeeded in definitely clearing
her character, together with that of her brother, and demonstrated that
the legend of the crime, so industriously inculated by Byron's grandson,
has no shadow of foundation in fact.
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES 1
II. CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW 10
III. A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS--MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER,
AND MARY CHAWORTH 23
IV. LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE AND FLIRTATIONS AT SOUTHWELL 35
V. REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS" 50
VI. THE GRAND TOUR--FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN 63
VII. FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH 75
VIII. THE MAID OF ATHENS--MRS. WERRY--MRS. PEDLEY--THE SWIMMING
OF THE HELLESPONT 87
IX. RETURN TO ENGLAND--PUBLICATION OF "CHILDE HAROLD" 101
X. THE SECRET ORCHARD 114
XI. LADY CAROLINE LAMB 127
XII. THE QUARREL WITH LADY CAROLINE--HER CHARACTER AND
SUBSEQUENT CAREER 138
XIII. LADY OXFORD--BYRON'S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER 148
XIV. AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS--THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN
TRAVEL, AND OF MARY CHAWORTH 158
XV. RENEWAL AND INTERRUPTION OF RELATIONS WITH MARY CHAWORTH 170
XVI. MARRIAGE 182
XVII. INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER 194
XVIII. LADY BYRON'S DEMAND FOR A SEPARATION--RUMOURS THAT
"GROSS CHARGES" MIGHT BE BROUGHT, INVOLVING MRS. LEIGH 208
XIX. "GROSS CHARGES" DISAVOWED BY LADY BYRON--SEPARATION
AGREED TO 221
XX. REVIVAL OF THE BYRON SCANDAL BY MRS. BEECHER STOWE AND
THE LATE LORD LOVELACE 231
XXI. INHERENT IMPROBABILITY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST AUGUSTA
LEIGH--THE ALLEGATION THAT SHE "CONFESSED"--THE PROOF THAT SHE
DID NOTHING OF THE KIND 240
XXII. BYRON'S DEPARTURE FOR THE CONTINENT--HIS ACQUAINTANCE
WITH JANE CLAIRMONT 253
XXIII. LIFE AT GENEVA--THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT 264
XXIV. FROM GENEVA TO VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE DRAPER'S WIFE 277
XXV. AT VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER'S WIFE--DISSOLUTE
PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE--ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND
REFORMATION 287
XXVI. IN THE VENETIAN SALONS--INTRODUCTION TO COUNTESS GUICCIOLI 300
XXVII. BYRON'S RELATIONS WITH THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI AND HER
HUSBAND AT RAVENNA 312
XXVIII. REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES--REMOVAL FROM RAVENNA TO PISA 324
XXIX. THE TRIVIAL ROUND AT PISA 336
XXX. FROM PISA TO GENOA 345
XXXI. DEPARTURE FOR GREECE 356
XXXII. DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE 369
APPENDIX 375
INDEX 377
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LORD BYRON _Frontispiece_
THE MAID OF ATHENS _To face page_ 88
LADY CAROLINE LAMB " 128
MARY CHAWORTH " 174
LADY BYRON " 222
COUNTESS GUICCIOLI " 302
CHAPTER I
ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES
The Byrons came over with the Conqueror, helped him to conquer, and were
rewarded with a grant of landed estates in Lancashire. Hundreds of years
elapsed before they distinguished themselves either for good or evil, or
emerged from the ruck of the landed gentry. There were Byrons at Crecy,
and at the siege of Calais; and there probably were Byrons among the
Crusaders. There is even a legend of a Byron Crusader rescuing a Christian
maiden from the Saracens; but neither the maiden nor the Crusader can be
identified. The authentic history of the family only begins with the grant
of Newstead Abbey, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, to
Sir John Byron of Clayton, in Lancashire--a reward, apparently, for
services rendered by his father at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
Even so, however, the Byrons remained comparatively inconspicuous[1]; and
their records only begin to be full and interesting at the time of the war
between Charles I. and his Parliament. Seven Byrons, all brothers, then
fought on the King's side; and the most distinguished of the seven was the
eldest, another Sir John Byron of Clayton--a loyal, valiant, and impetuous
soldier, with more zeal than discretion. It was his charge that broke
Haslerig's cuirassiers at Roundway Down. It was in his regiment that
Falkland was fighting when he fell at Newbury. On the other hand he helped
to lose the battle of Marston Moor by charging without orders. "By Lord
Byron's improper charge," Prince Rupert reported, "much harm hath been
done."
He had been given his peerage--with limitations in default of issue male
to his six surviving brothers and the issue male of their bodies--in the
midst of the war. After Naseby, he went to Paris, and spent the rest of
his life in exile. His first wife being dead, he married a second--a lady
concerning whom there is a piquant note in Pepys' Diary. She was, Pepys
tells us, one of Charles II.'s mistresses--his "seventeenth mistress
aboard," who, as the diarist proceeds, "did not leave him till she got him
to give her an order for £4000 worth of plate; but, by delays, thanks be
to God! she died before she got it."
This first Lord Byron died childless, and the title passed to his brother
Richard, who had also distinguished himself in the war on the King's side.
He was one of the colonels whose gallantry at Edgehill the University of
Oxford rewarded with honorary degrees; and he was Governor, successively,
of Appleby and Newark. He tried to seduce his kinsman, Colonel
Hutchinson, from his allegiance to the Parliament, but without avail.
"Except," Colonel Hutchinson told him, "he found his own heart prone to
such treachery, he might consider that there was, if nothing else, so much
of a Byron's blood in him that he should very much scorn to betray or quit
a trust he had undertaken."
The third Lord, Richard's son William, succeeded to the title in 1679. His
marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Chaworth, brings the name of
the heroine of the poet's first and last love into the story; and he is
also notable as the first Byron who had a taste, if not actually a turn,
for literature. Thomas Shipman, the royalist singer whose songs indicate,
according to Mr. Thomas Seccombe's criticism in the "Dictionary of
National Biography," that "the severe morals of the Roundheads were even
less to his taste than their politics," was his intimate friend; and
Shipman's "Carolina" contains a set of verses from his pen:
"_My whole ambition only does extend
To gain the name of Shipman's faithful friend;
And though I cannot amply speak your praise,
I'll wear the myrtle, tho' you wear the bays._"
That is a fair specimen of the third Lord Byron's poetical style; and it
is clear that his descendant did not need to be a great poet in order to
improve upon it. Of his son, the fourth Lord, who died in 1736, there is
nothing to be said; but his grandson, the fifth Lord, lives in history
and tradition as "the wicked Lord Byron." The report of his arraignment
before his fellow peers on the charge of murdering his relative, Mr.
William Chaworth, in 1765, may be read in the Nineteenth Volume of State
Trials, though the most careful reading is likely to leave the rights of
the case obscure.
The tragedy, whatever the rights of it, occurred after one of the weekly
dinners of the Nottinghamshire County Club, at the Star and Garter Tavern
in Pall Mall. The quarrel arose out of a heated discussion on the subject
of preserving game--a topic which country gentlemen are particularly
liable to discuss with heat. Lord Byron is said to have advocated
leniency, and Mr. Chaworth severity, towards poachers. The argument led to
a wager; and the two men went upstairs together--apparently for the
purpose of arranging the terms of the wager--and entered a room lighted
only by a dull fire and a single candle. As soon as the door was closed,
they drew their swords and fought, and Lord Byron ran Mr. Chaworth through
the body.
Those are the only points on which all the depositions agree. Lord Byron
said that Chaworth, who was the better swordsman of the two, challenged
him to fight, and that the fight was conducted fairly. The case for the
prosecution was that Chaworth did not mean to fight, and that Lord Byron
attacked him unawares. Chaworth, though he lingered for some hours, and
was questioned on the subject, said nothing to exonerate his assailant.
That, broadly speaking, was the evidence on which the peers had to come to
their decision; and they found Lord Byron not guilty of murder but guilty
of manslaughter. Pleading his privilege as a peer, he was released on
payment of the fees.
Society, however, inclined to the view that he had not fought fairly. Two
years before he had been Master of the Stag-hounds. Now he was cut by the
county, and relapsed into misanthropic debauchery. He quarrelled with his
son, the Honorable William Byron, sometime M.P. for Morpeth, for
contracting a marriage of which he disapproved. He drove his wife away
from Newstead by his brutality, and consorted with a low-born "Lady
Betty." The stories of his shooting his coachman and trying to drown his
wife were untrue, but his neighbours believed them, and behaved
accordingly; and an unpleasant picture of his retirement may be found in
Horace Walpole's Letters.
"The present Lord," Horace Walpole writes, "hath lost large sums, and
paid part in old oaks; five thousand pounds worth have been cut down
near the house. _En revanche_, he has built two baby forts to pay his
country in castles for the damage done to the Navy, and planted a
handful of Scotch firs that look like plough-boys dressed in old
family liveries for a public day."
Playing at naval battles and bombardments, with toy ships, on the little
lakes in his park, was, indeed, the favourite, if not the only,
recreation of the wicked lord's old age. It is said that his chief purpose
in cutting down the timber was to spite and embarrass his heirs; and he
did, at any rate, involve his heir in a law suit almost as long as the
famous case of Jarndyce _versus_ Jarndyce by means of an improper sale of
the Byron property at Rochdale.
His heir, however, was not to be either his son or his grandson. They both
predeceased him--the latter dying in Corsica in 1794--and the title and
estates passed to the issue of his brother John, known to the Navy List as
Admiral Byron, and to the navy as "foul weather Jack."
The Admiral had been round the world with Anson, had been wrecked on the
coast of Chili, and had published a narrative--"my granddad's
narrative"--of his hardships and adventures. He had later been sent round
the world on a voyage of discovery on his own account, but had discovered
nothing in particular. Finally he had fought, not too successfully,
against d'Estaing in the West Indies, and had withdrawn to misanthropic
isolation. His son, Captain Byron, of the Guards, known to his
contemporaries as "Mad Jack Byron," was a handsome youth of worthless
character, but very fascinating to women. His elopement, while still a
minor, with the Marchioness of Carmarthen, was one of the sensational
events of a London season.
Lady Carmarthen's husband having divorced her, Mad Jack married her in
1778. They lived together in Paris and at Chantilly--prosperously, for
the bride had £4000 a year in her own right. A child was born--Augusta,
who subsequently married Colonel Leigh; but, in 1784, his wife died, and
Captain Byron, heavily in debt, was once more thrown on his own resources.
He returned to England to look for an heiress, and he found one in the
person of Miss Gordon of Gight, whom he met and married at Bath in 1786.
The fortune, when the landed estates had been realised, amounted to about
£23,000; and Captain Byron's clamorous creditors took most of it. A
considerable portion of what was left was quickly squandered in riotous
living on the Continent. The ultimate income consisted of the interest
(subject to an annuity to Mrs. Byron's grandmother) on the sum of £4200;
and that lamentable financial position had already been reached when
Captain and Mrs. Byron came back to England and took a furnished house in
Holles Street, where George Noel Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, was born on
January 22, 1788.
There we have, in brief outline, all that is essential of the little that
is known of Byron's heredity. If it is not precisely common-place, it is
at least undistinguished. No one can ever have generalised from it and
said that the Byrons were brilliant, or even--in spite of the third Lord's
conscientious attempts at versification--that they were "literary." A far
more likely generalisation would have been that the Byrons were mad.
They were not quite that, of course, though some of them were eccentric;
and those who were eccentric had the courage of their eccentricity. But
they were, at least so far as we know them, impetuous and reckless
men--men who went through life in the spirit of a bull charging a gate,
doing what they chose to do because they chose to do it, with a defiant
air of "damn the consequences." We find that note alike in the first
Lord's "improper charge" on Marston Moor, and the fifth Lord's improvised
duel in the dark room of the Pall Mall tavern, and in Captain Byron's
dashing elopement with a noble neighbour's wife. We shall catch it again,
and more than once, in our survey of the career of the one Byron who has
been famous; and we shall see how much his fame owed to his pride, his
determined indifference, in spite of his prickly sensitiveness, to public
opinion, and his clear-cut, haughty character.
Legh Richmond, the popular evangelical preacher, once said that, if Byron
had been as bad a poet as he was a man, his poetry would have done but
little harm, but that criticism is almost an inversion of the truth.
Byron, in fact, imposed himself far less because his poetry was good than
because his personality was strong. He never saw as far into the heart of
things as Wordsworth. When he tried to do so, at Shelley's instigation, he
only saw what Wordsworth had already shown; and there are many passages in
his work which might fairly be described as being "like Wordsworth only
less so." None of his shorter pieces are fit to stand beside "The world is
too much with us," and he never wrote a line so wonderfully inspired as
Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity."
But he had one advantage over Wordsworth. He spoke out; he was not afraid
of saying things. His genius had all the hard riding, neck-or-nothing
temper of the earlier, undistinguished Byrons behind it. He was "dowered
with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,"--and he damned the
consequences with the haphazard blasphemy of an aristocrat who feels sure
of himself, and has no need to pick his words. He was quite ready to damn
them in the presence of ladies, and in the face of kings; and he damned
them as one having authority, and not as the democratic upstarts; so that
the world listened attentively, wondering what he would say next, and even
Shelley, observing how easily he compelled a hearing, was fully persuaded
that Byron was a greater poet than himself.
That, in the main, it would seem, was how heredity affected him. The
hereditary influences, however, were, in their turn modified by the
strange circumstances of his upbringing; and it is time to glance at them,
and see how far they help to account for the loneliness and aloofness of
Byron's temperament, for the sensitiveness already referred to, and for
the ultimate attitude known as the Byronic pose.
CHAPTER II
CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW
Captain and Mrs. Byron, finding themselves impoverished, left Holles
Street, and retired to Aberdeen, to live on an income of £150 a year.
Augusta having been taken off their hands by her grandmother, Lady
Holderness, they were alone together, with the baby and the nurse, in
cheap and gloomy lodgings; and they soon began to wrangle. It was the old
story, no doubt, of poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of
the window, leaving only incompatibility of temper behind.
The husband, though inclined to be amiable as long as things went well,
was, in modern phrase, a "waster." The wife, though shrewd and possessed
of some domestic virtues, was, in the language of all time, a scold. He
wanted to run into debt in order to keep up appearances; she to disregard
appearances in order to live within her income. Dinners of many courses
and wines of approved vintages seemed to her the superfluities but to him
the necessaries of life. He probably did not mince words in expressing his
view of the matter; she certainly minced none in expressing hers. There is
a strong presumption, too, that she complained of him to her neighbours;
for it is well attested in her son's letters to his sister that she was
that sort of woman. So the day came when Captain Byron walked out of the
house, vowing that he would live with his wife no longer.
For a time he lived in a separate lodging in the same street. Presently,
scraping some money together--borrowing it, that is to say, without any
intention of repaying it--he went to France to amuse himself; and in
January 1791, at the age of thirty-five, he died at Valenciennes. It has
been suggested that he committed suicide, but nothing is known for
certain. One of Byron's earliest recollections was of his mother's weeping
at the news of her husband's death, and of his own astonishment at her
tears. She had continually nagged at him, and heaped abuse on him, while
he lived; yet now her distracted shrieks filled the house and disturbed
the neighbourhood. That was the child's earliest lesson in the
unaccountable ways of women. He was only three at the time--yet old enough
to wonder, though not to understand.
His stay at Aberdeen was to last for seven more years. He was to go to
school there, and to be accounted a dunce, though not a fool. He was to
learn religion there from his nurse, who taught him the dark, alarming
Calvinistic doctrine; and he was to develop some of the traits and
characteristics which were afterwards to be pronounced. On the whole,
indeed, in spite of alleviations, he had a gloomy childhood, by a sense,
however imperfectly comprehended, of the contrast between life as it was
and life as it ought to have been.
He had been born proud, inheriting quite as much pride from his mother's
as from his father's family. He soon came to know that there were such
things as old families, and that the Byron family was one of the oldest of
them. It was borne in upon him by what he saw and heard that the proper
place for a baron was a baronial hall; and he could see that the apartment
in which he was growing up was neither a hall nor baronial. The first
apartment occupied by his mother was, in fact, as has already been said, a
lodging, and the second was an "upper part," the furniture of which, when
it ultimately came to be sold, fetched exactly £74 17s. 7d.
The boy must have felt--we may depend upon it that his mother told
him--that there was something wrong about that; that his school companions
were make-shift associates, not really worthy of him; that he was, as it
were, a child born in exile, and unjustly kept out of his rights. The
feeling must have grown stronger--we may be quite sure that his mother
stimulated it--when the unexpected death of his cousin made him the direct
heir to the title and estates; and, indeed, it was a feeling to some
extent justified by the facts. His great-uncle, the wicked Lord Byron,
ought then, as everybody said, to have shown signs of recognition, and to
have offered an allowance.
He made no sign, however, and he offered no allowance. Instead of doing
so, he went on felling timber, and effected the illegal sale of the
Rochdale property already referred too; and for four more years--from the
age of six, roughly speaking, to the age of ten--the heir apparent to the
barony was living poorly in an Aberdeen "upper part," while the actual
baron was living in luxury and state at Newstead. There were good grounds
for bitterness and resentment there; and Mrs. Byron, with her unruly
tongue, was the woman to make the most of them. Family pride grew apace
under her influence; and there was no other influence to check or
counteract it. The boy learnt to be as proud of his birth as a _parvenu_
would like to be--a characteristic of which we shall presently note some
examples.
If he was proud, however, he was also sensitive: and it may well have been
that his pride was, to some extent, a shield of protection which his
sensitiveness threw up. He was sensitive, not only because he was poor
when he ought to be rich and insignificant when he ought to be important,
but also because he was lame. An injury done at birth to his Achilles
tendons prevented him from planting his heels firmly on the ground. He had
to trot on the ball of his foot instead of walking; he could not even trot
for more than a mile or so at a time. A physical defect of that sort is
always a haunting grief to a child--especially so, perhaps, to a child
with a dawning consciousness of great mental gifts. It appears to such a
child as an irreparable wrong done--a wrong which can never be either
righted or avenged--an irremovable mark of inferiority, inviting taunts
and gibes.
Byron was sensitive on the subject, fearing that it made him ridiculous,
throughout his life, alike when he was the darling and when he was the
outcast of society; and various stories show how the deformity embittered
his childhood.
"What a pretty boy Byron is! What a pity he has such a leg!" he, one day,
heard a lady say to his nurse.
"Dinna speak of it," he screamed, stamping his foot, and slashing at her
with his toy whip.
And then there is the story of his mother who, in one of her fits of
passion, called him "a lame brat."
He drew himself up, and, with a restraint and a concentrated scorn beyond
his years, replied in the word which he afterwards put into "The
Hunchback":
"I was born so, mother."
That was one of the passionate scenes that passed between them--but only
one among many; and it was only in the case of this one affront which cut
him to the quick, that the child displayed such precocious self-control.
More often he answered rage with rage and violence with violence. In one
fit of fury he tore his new frock to shreds; in another he tried to stab
himself, at table, with a dinner knife. Exactly why he did it, or what he
resented, he probably did not know either at the time, or afterwards; but
he vaguely felt, no doubt, that something was wrong with the world, and
instinct impelled him to kick against the pricks and damn the whole nature
of things.
Then, in 1798, came the sudden change of fortune. The wicked Lord Byron
was dead at last; and the child of ten was a peer of the realm and the
heir to great, though heavily mortgaged estates. He could not take
possession of them yet--the embarrassed property needed to be delicately
nursed--but still, subject to the charges, they were his. He was taken to
look at them, and then, a tenant having been found for Newstead, Mrs.
Byron settled, first at Nottingham, and then in London, and her son was
sent to school--first to a preparatory school at Dulwich, and then to
Harrow.
Even so, however, there remained something strange, abnormal, and
uncomfortable about his position. On the one hand, Mrs. Byron, not
understanding, or trying to understand, him, nagged and scolded until he
lost almost all his natural affection for her. On the other hand, his
father's relatives, whether because they felt that "Mad Jack" had
disgraced the family, or because they objected to Mrs. Byron--who, in
truth, in spite of her good birth, was extremely provincial in her style,
and of loquacious, mischief-making propensities--were very far from
cordial. They had not even troubled to communicate with her when the death
of her son's cousin made him the direct heir, but had left her to learn
the news accidentally from strangers. Lord Carlisle, the son of his
grandfather's sister, Isabella Byron, consented to act as his guardian,
but abstained from making friendly overtures.
The fault in that case, however, was almost entirely Mrs. Byron's. There
was some dispute between her and Dr. Glennie, her son's Dulwich
headmaster--a dispute which culminated in a fit of hysterics in Dr.
Glennie's study. Lord Carlisle was appealed to, and the result of his
attempt at mediation was that Mrs. Byron practically ordered him out of
the house. Byron, of course, could not help that; but, equally of course,
he suffered from it. He was neglected, and he was sensible of the neglect.
He had come into a world in which he had every right to move, only to be
made to feel that he was not wanted there. Born in exile, and having
returned from exile, he was cold-shouldered by kinsmen who seemed to think
that he would have done better to remain in exile.
Very likely he was, at that age, somewhat of a lout, shy, ill at ease, and
unprepossessing. Genius does not necessarily reflect itself in polished
behaviour. Aberdeen is not as good a school of manners as Eton, and Mrs.
Byron was but an indifferent teacher of deportment. But his pride, it
seems clear, was not the less but the greater because of his inability to
express it in strict accordance with the rules of the best society. He was
a Byron--a peer of the realm--the senior representative of an ancient
house. He knew that respect, and even homage, were due to him; and he felt
that he must assert himself--if not in one way, then in another. So, when
the Earl of Portsmouth--a peer of comparatively recent creation--presumed
to give his ear a friendly pinch, he asserted himself by picking up a
sea-shell and throwing it at the Earl of Portsmouth's head. That would
teach the Earl, he said, not to take liberties with other members of the
aristocracy.
At this date, too, when writing to his mother, he addressed her as "the
Honorable Mrs. Byron," a designation to which, of course, she had no
shadow of a right; and he earned the nickname of "the old English Baron"
by his habit of boasting to his schoolfellows of the amazing antiquity of
his lineage. Lord Carlisle may well have thought that it was high time for
his ward to go to Harrow to be licked or kicked into shape. He went there
in 1803, at the age of thirteen and a half.
Dr. Drury, of Harrow, was the first man who saw in Byron the promise of
future distinction. "He has talents, my lord," he soon assured his
guardian, "which will add lustre to his rank." Whereat Lord Carlisle
merely shrugged his shoulders and said, "Indeed!"--whether because his
ward's talents were a matter of indifference to him, or because he
considered that rank could dispense with the lustre which talents bestow.
According to his own recollections, Byron was quick but indolent. He could
run level in the class-room with Sir Robert Peel, who afterwards took a
sensational double-first at Oxford, when he chose; but, as a rule, he did
not choose. He absorbed a good deal of scholarship, without ever becoming
a good scholar in the technical sense, and his declamations on the
speech-days were much applauded. There are records to the effect that he
was bullied. A specially offensive insult directed at him in later life
drew from him the retort that he had not passed through a public school
without learning that he was deformed; and Leigh Hunt has related that
sometimes "he would wake and find his leg in a tub of water." But he was
not an easy boy to bully, for he was ready to fight on small provocation;
and he won all his fights except one. He did credit to his religious
training by punching Lord Calthorpe's head for calling him an atheist,
though it is possible that his objections to the obnoxious epithet were as
much social as theological, for an atheist, among schoolboys is, by
implication, an "outsider."
"I was a most unpopular boy," he told Moore, "but _led_ latterly." The
latter statement has been generally accepted by his biographers; but not
all the stories told in support of it stand the test of inquiry. There is
the story, for instance, accepted even by Cordy Jeaffreson, that he led
the revolt against Butler's appointment to the headmastership, but
prevented his followers from burning down one of the class-rooms by
reminding them that the names of their ancestors were carved upon the
desks. "I can certify," wrote the late Dean Merivale of Ely, "that just
such a story was told in my early days of Sir John Richardson;" so that
Byron seems here to have got the credit for another hero's exploits.
There are the stories, too, of his connection with the first Eton and
Harrow cricket match. Cordy Jeaffreson goes so far as to express doubt
whether he took part in the match at all; but that is exaggerated
scepticism, which research would have confuted. The score is printed in
Lillywhite's "Cricket Scores and Biographies of celebrated Cricketers;"
and it appears therefrom that Byron scored seven runs in the first innings
and two in the second, and also bowled one wicket; but even on that
subject the Dean of Ely, who went to Harrow in 1818, has something to say.
"It is clear," the Dean writes, "that he was never a leader.... On the
contrary, awkward, sentimental, and addicted to dreaming and
tombstones, he seems to have been held in little estimation among our
spirited athletes. The remark was once made to me by Mr. John Arthur
Lloyd (of Salop), a well-known Harrovian, who had been captain of the
school in the year of the first match with Eton (1805): 'Yes,' he
said, 'Byron played in the match, and very badly too. He should never
have been in the eleven if my counsel had been taken.'"
And the Dean goes on, picturing Byron's awkwardness:
"Mrs. Drury was once heard to say of him: 'There goes Byron' (Birron
she called him) 'straggling up the hill, like a ship in a storm
without rudder or compass.'"
Byron's influence at Harrow, in short, was exercised over his juniors
rather than his contemporaries. It pleased him, when he was big enough, to
protect small boys from school tyrants. One catches his feudal spirit
again in his appeal to a bully not to lick Lord Delawarr "because he is a
fellow peer"; but he was also ready to intervene in other cases in which
that plea could not be urged; and he had the reward that might be
expected. He once offered to take a licking for one of the Peels; and he
became a hero with hero-worshippers--titled hero-worshippers for the most
part--sitting at his feet. Lord Delawarr, Lord Clare, the Duke of Dorset,
the Honorable John Wingfield, were the most conspicuous among them. It was
from their adulation that he got his first taste of the incense which was,
in later years, to be burnt to him so lavishly.
He described his school friendships, when he looked back on them, as
"passions"; and there is no denying that the language of the letters which
he wrote to his friends was inordinately passionate for a schoolboy
addressing schoolfellows. "Dearest" is a more frequent introduction to
them than "dear," and the word "sweet" also occurs. It is not the happiest
of signs to find a schoolboy writing such letters; and it is not
altogether impossible that unfounded apprehensions caused by them account
for the suggestion made by Drury--though the fact is not mentioned in the
biographies--that Byron should be quietly removed from the school on the
ground that his conduct was causing "much trouble and uneasiness."
That, however, is uncertain, and one must not insist. All that the
so-called "passions"--occasionally detrimental though they may have been
to school discipline--demonstrate is Byron's enjoyment of flattery, and
his proneness to sentiment and gush. He liked, as he grew older, to accept
flattery, while professing to be superior to it; to enjoy sentiment, and
then to laugh at it; to gush with the most gushing, and then suddenly to
turn round and "say 'damn' instead." But the cynicism which was afterwards
to alternate with the sentimentalism had not developed yet. He did not yet
say "damn"--at all events in that connection.
One must think of him as a boy with a great capacity for passionate
affection, and a precocious tendency to gush, deprived of the most natural
outlets for his emotions. He could not love his mother because she was a
virago; he hardly ever saw his sister; his guardian kept him coldly at a
distance. Consequently his feelings, dammed in one direction, broke out
with almost ludicrous intensity in another; and his friendships were
sentimental to a degree unusual, though not, of course, unknown or
unprecedented, among schoolboys. He wrote sentimental verses to his
friends.
But not to them alone. "Hours of Idleness," first published when he was a
Cambridge undergraduate, is the idealised record of his school
friendships; but it is also the idealised record of other, and very
different, excursions into sentiment. It introduces us to Mary Duff, to
Margaret Parker, to Mary Chaworth,--and also to some other Maries of less
importance; and we will turn back and glance, in quick succession at their
stories before following Byron to Cambridge.
CHAPTER III
A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS--MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH
First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She
was one of Byron's Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is
hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a
child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud
chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage--described by Byron as a
"faux pas" because it was socially disadvantageous--and left the city; and
the two children never met again.
It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than
seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and
liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally
precocious. "I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff," he
wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded
himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his
nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat
together--"gravely making love in our way"--while Mary expressed pity for
her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he
reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the
sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the
idyll.
"My mother," he proceeded, "used always to rally me about this
childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen,
she told me, one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh,
from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to
a Mr. C----.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or
account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into
convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better,
she generally avoided the subject--to _me_--and contented herself with
telling it to all her acquaintance."
And then again:
"My misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes
doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may,
hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder
stroke--it nearly choked me--to the horror of my mother and the
astonishment and almost incredulity of nearly everybody."
It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact
that Mary Duff's husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she
lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her
whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn's port. But we may also doubt,
perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his
own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with
other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness
of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come
to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff's marriage was
also the date of Byron's desperate passion for Mary Chaworth.
Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had
intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron's
daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to
her mother. "Dear Madam," it began, "My Mamma being unable to write
herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and
you are welcome to them whenever you please." For the rest, one can only
quote Byron's brief reminiscence:
"My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition
of a passion for my first cousin Margaret Parker, one of the most
beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but
it would be difficult for me to forget her--her dark eyes--her long
eyelashes--her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then
about twelve--she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year
or two afterwards in consequence of a fall which injured her spine
and induced consumption.... My sister told me that, when she went to
see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my
name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the
eyes.... I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the
country, till she was gone. Some years after I made an attempt at an
elegy--a very dull one."
And then Byron speaks of his cousin's "transparent" beauty--"she looked as
if she had been made out of a rainbow"--and concludes:
"My passion had its usual effect upon me--I could not eat--I could not
sleep--I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she
loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time that must
elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of
separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now."
The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked
for it on the ground that it was "composed at the age of fourteen." It is
very youthful in tone--quite on the conventional lines--as one would
expect. A single quatrain may be given--not to be criticised, but merely
to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his
pastors and masters told him to look at it:
"_And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign!
And, madly, Godlike Providence accuse!
Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain;--
I'll ne'er submission to my God refuse._"
We are still a long way here from the intense, the cynical, the defiant,
or even the posturing Byron of later years. The gift of personal
expression has not yet come to him; and he is still in literary fetters,
weeping, on paper, according to the rules. Intensity and the personal note
only begin with his sudden love for Mary Chaworth; cynicism and defiance
only begin after that love affair has ended in failure.
Mary Chaworth was the heir of the Annesley property, adjoining Newstead,
and she was the grand-niece of the Chaworth whom the wicked Lord Byron ran
through the body in the upper chamber of the Pall Mall tavern; so that
their marriage, if they could have been married, would, as Byron says,
"have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers." But Byron
was not yet the Byron who had only to come, and to be seen, in order to
conquer. He was a schoolboy of fifteen, which is an awkward age. He had
achieved no triumphs in any field which could give him self-assurance. He
was not yet a leader, even among his schoolfellows; and he was not only
lame, but also fat. How shall a fat boy hope, whatever fires of genius
burn within him, to enter the lists against his elders and bear away the
belle from county balls? Byron, at any rate, failed signally in the
attempt to do so.
Newstead having been let to Lord Grey de Ruthen, Mrs. Byron was, at the
time, lodging at Nottingham; and Byron had various reasons for preferring
to see as little of her as possible. She was never sympathetic; she was
often quarrelsome; it was her pleasant habit, when annoyed, to rattle the
fire-irons and throw the tongs at him. So he often availed himself of his
tenant's invitation to visit Newstead, whenever he liked; and from
Newstead it was the most natural thing in the world that he should go over
to Annesley, where Miss Chaworth, with whom he already had a slight
acquaintance, was living with her mother, Mrs. Clarke.
He was always welcome there. There was as little desire on his cousin's
side as on his to revive the recollection of the feud. When he came to
call, he was pressed to stay and sleep. At first he refused, most probably
from shyness, though he professed a superstitious fear of the family
portraits. They had "taken a grudge to him," he said, on account of the
duel; they would "come down from their frames at night to haunt him." But
presently his fears, or his shyness, were conquered. He had seen a ghost,
he said, in the park; and if he must see ghosts he might just as well see
them in the house; so, if it was all the same to his hosts, he would like
to stay.
He stayed, and was entranced with Mary Chaworth's singing. He rode with
her, and practiced pistol shooting on the terrace--more than a little
pleased, one conjectures, to show off his marksmanship. He went with
her--and with others, including a chaperon--on an excursion to Matlock and
Castleton. A note, written long afterwards, preserves a memory of the
trip:
"It happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat
(in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a
rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only
to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the
stern, stooping all the time. The companion of my transit was M.A.C.,
with whom I had long been in love, and never _told_ it, though _she_
had discovered it without. I recollect my sensations, but cannot
describe them, and it is as well."
And no doubt Mary Chaworth encouraged the boy, amused at his raptures,
enjoying the visible proof of her power, prepared to snub him, in the end,
if necessary, but scarcely expecting that there would be any need for her
to do so. She was seventeen, and a girl of seventeen always feels capable
of reminding a boy of fifteen that the prayer book forbids him to marry
his grandmother. Moreover, she was engaged, though the engagement had not
yet been announced, to Mr. John Musters--a grown man and a Philistine--a
handsome, rather dissipated, hard-riding and hard-drinking country squire.
The dreamy, limping, fat boy from Harrow had no shadow of a chance against
his athletic rival. It was impossible for Mary Chaworth to divine the
genius that lurked beneath the fat. One has no right to expect such powers
of divination from girls of seventeen.
No doubt she thought the fat boy, as she would have said, "good fun." No
doubt she was amused when, as a demonstration that he was not too young to
be loved, he showed her the locket which Margaret Parker had given him,
three years before, when he was twelve. Unquestionably she flirted with
him--or, at least, let him flirt with her. She even gave him a ring, and
the gift must have raised high hopes, though it was the cause of the
discovery which brought the flirtation to an end.
Squire Musters discovered the ring among Byron's clothes one day when he
and the boy were bathing together in the Trent. He recognised it, picked
it up, and put it in his pocket. Byron claimed it, and Musters declined to
give it up; and then, to quote the Countess Guiccioli, who is the
authority for the story:
"High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped
on a horse and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth,
who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her
consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters by promising to
declare immediately her engagement with him."
Such is the story, as one gets it, through the Countess and through Moore,
from Byron himself; but we also get a side glimpse at it in a letter,
recently published,[2] from Mrs. Byron to Hanson, the family solicitor.
From this we gather that Byron, in order to make love, had absented
himself from school; that Drury had inquired the reason of his absence;
and that his mother was making strenuous, but unavailing, efforts to
induce him to return. Nothing was the matter with him but love--"desperate
love, the _worst_ of all _maladies_ in my opinion." He had hardly been to
see his mother at all, but had been spending all his time at Annesley. "It
is the last of all connexions," she added, "that I should wish to take
place"; and she begged Mr. Hanson to make arrangements for her son to
spend his next holidays elsewhere. Expense was no object; and it would
suit her very well if Dr. Drury could be induced to detain him at Harrow.
And Byron himself, meanwhile, was writing to his mother, alternately using
lofty language about his right to choose his own friends, and pleading for
one more day in order that he might take leave.
He took it; but there is more than one version of the story.
"Do you think," he overheard Mary Chaworth say to her maid, "that I could
care anything for that lame boy?" And, having heard that, "he instantly
darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never
stopped till he found himself at Newstead." That is what Moore tells us;
but the picture drawn in "The Dream,"--the most obviously and
deliberately autobiographical of Byron's poems--is different.
"She loved," he writes:
"_Another: even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she stood
Looking afar as if her lover's steed
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew._"
She was waiting, that is to say, for Squire Musters to ride up the lane,
while listening to Byron's declaration. That is the first picture; and
then there follows the picture of the boy who "within an antique oratory
stood," and to whom, presently, "the lady of his love re-entered":
"_She was serene and smiling then, and yet
She knew she was by him beloved--she knew,
For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw
That he was wretched, but she saw not all.
He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp
He took her hand; a moment o'er his face
A tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,
For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne'er repassed that hoary threshold more._"
There we have the Mary Chaworth legend as it has been handed down from one
generation of biographers to another. Byron, according to that legend, saw
Mary once after her marriage, but once only. He was on the point of
visiting her at a later date, but was dissuaded by his sister. "If you
go," Augusta said, "you will fall in love again, and then there will be a
scene; one step will lead to another, _et cela fera un éclat_." He agreed
that the reasoning was sound, and did as he was advised. He tells that
story himself, and adds: "Shortly after, I married."
And yet--the legend continues--this hopeless love, which touched his heart
at the age of fifteen, was the dominating influence of his life. Mary
Chaworth, though always absent, was yet always present. He never loved any
other woman, though he tried to love, and indeed seemed to love, several.
The vision of her face always came between him and them. His later love
affairs were only concessions, or attempts to escape from himself and his
memories--unavailing attempts, for this memory continued to haunt him
until the end.
It sounds incredible. The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts;
but the memories of youth are short, and the dreams of youth are dreams
from which we never fail to wake. And yet Byron insists, quite as much as
biographers have insisted. He insists in "The Dream," which was written
more than a decade after the parting. He insists in later poems, the inner
meaning of which is hardly to be questioned. So that speculation is
challenged, and, when pursued, leads us inevitably to a dilemma.
For of two things, one: Either Byron was posing--posing not only to the
world but to himself; or else the story, as all the biographers from Moore
to Cordy Jeaffreson have told it, is incomplete, and after an interlude,
had a sequel.
To search for such a sequel will be our task presently. Unless we can find
one, the development of the personal note in Byron's work will have to be
left unexplained. The impression which we get, if we read the more
personal poems in quick succession, is of a man who first awakes from the
dream of love--and remains very wide awake for a season--and then relapses
and dreams it all over again. Unless the story which first set him
dreaming had had a sequel, that would hardly be. So we will seek for the
sequel in due course, though we must first gather up the incidents of the
interlude.
CHAPTER IV
LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE AND FLIRTATIONS AT SOUTHWELL
Baffled in love, Byron returned to Harrow, after a term's absence, in
January 1804, and remained there for another eighteen months. This
eighteen months is the period during which he describes himself as having
been happy at school. It is also the period during which he haunted the
Harrow churchyard, indulging his day dreams as he looked down from the
hillside on the wide, green valley of the Thames. Those dreams, it is
hardly to be doubted, were chiefly of Mary Chaworth; and we may picture
the poet's secret sorrow as giving him, fat though he was, a sense of
superiority over other boys who had no secret sorrows. Apparently, too,
casting about for an explanation of his failure, he realised that, in the
rivalries of love, the victory is far less likely to rest with the fat
than with the lame; and so, presently,--though not until after an interval
of reflection--he set himself the task of compelling his too solid flesh
to melt.
He has been laughed at, and charged with vanity for doing so; but he was
right. He would also have been ridiculed, and with more justice, if he had
resigned himself to be overwhelmed by the rising tide of superabundant
tissue. Fatness is not merely a grotesque condition. It is a condition
incompatible with fitness; and it is far nobler to resist it with
systematic heroism than to cultivate it and call heaven and earth to
witness that one is the fattest person going; and the fact that Byron, by
dint of exercises which made him perspire, a careful diet, and a
persistent use of Epsom salts, reduced his weight from fourteen stone six
to twelve stone seven, is no small achievement to be passed over lightly.
It is, on the contrary, one of the most memorable incidents in his
development--the greatest of all the feats performed by him at Trinity
College, Cambridge,[3] where he began to reside in October 1805.
He did not read for honours. At Oxford he might have done so, and might
have figured in the same class list as his Harrow friend, Sir Robert Peel,
who took a double-first, and Archbishop Whately, who took a double-second.
At Cambridge, however, the pernicious rule prevailed that honours were
only for mathematicians. The Classical Tripos was not originated until a
good many years afterwards, and Byron had neither talent nor taste for
figures. The most notable, though not the highest, wranglers of his year
were Adam Sedgwick, the geologist, and Blomfield, Bishop of London. Byron
would have had to work very hard to make any show against them. He did
not enter the competition, but let his mind exercise itself on more
congenial themes, cherishing the belief--so erroneous and yet so
common--that Senior Wranglers never come to any good in after life.
His allowance was £500 a year; and he kept a servant and a horse. His
general proceedings, except when he was writing verses were pretty similar
to those of the average young nobleman who attends a University, not to
instruct but to amuse himself. He rode, and fenced, and boxed, and swam,
and dived; he gambled and backed horses; he was alternately guest and host
at rather uproarious wine-parties, and was spoken of as a young man "of
very tumultuous passions." The statement has been made--he has made it
himself and his biographers have repeated it--that he lived quietly at
first, and only latterly got into a dissipated set; but as we find him, in
his second term, entreating his sister to back a bill for £800, the
statement probably needs to be modified in order to square with the facts.
Apparently Augusta did not comply with his request; but the proofs that he
lived beyond his means are ample. Mrs. Byron was as loud in her wail on
the subject as the widows of Asher. She complains--this also in the second
term--of bills "coming in thick upon me to double the amount I expected";
and she protests, in Byron's first Easter vacation, against his wanton
extravagance in subscribing thirty guineas to Pitt's statue; while, in the
course of the next Easter vacation we find her consulting the family
solicitor as to the propriety of borrowing £1000 to get her son out of the
hands of the Jews, and declaring that, during the whole of his Cambridge
career he has done "nothing but drink, gamble, and spend money."
Very similar is the testimony of his own and his sister's letters. "I was
much surprised," Augusta writes, in the second term, to the solicitor, "to
see my brother a week ago at the Play, as I think he ought to be employing
his time more profitably at Cambridge." Byron himself, writing to his
intimates, confesses to several departures from sobriety. The first was in
celebration of the Eton and Harrow match, which was followed by a
convivial scene, foreshadowing those at the Empire on boat-race night, at
some place of public entertainment. "How I got home after the play," Byron
says, "God knows. I hardly recollect, as my brain was so much confused by
the heat, the row, and the wine I drank, that I could not remember in the
morning how I found my way to bed." Later, in a letter to Miss Elizabeth
Bridget Pigot of Southwell, he speaks of his life as "one continual
routine of dissipation," talks of "a bottle of claret in my head," and
concludes with the specific admission: "Sorry to say been drunk every day,
and not quite sober yet."
Possibly he exaggerates a little; but those who know the Universities best
will be least likely to suspect him of exaggerating very much. There is
always a set which lives in that style at any college frequented by young
men of ample means. Their ways, _mutatis mutandis_, are faithfully
described in the pages of "Verdant Green." Byron's career, once more
_mutatis mutandis_, was not unlike the career of Charles Larkyns and
Little Mr. Bouncer in Cuthbert Bede's picture of life at the sister
University. He had, at any rate, one foot in such a set as that, though he
was in a better set as well, and formed serious friendships with such men
as Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, Charles Skinner Matthews,
afterwards Fellow of Downing, Scrope Davies, afterwards Fellow of King's,
and Francis Hodgson, ultimately Provost of Eton. It is not quite clear
whether he was, or was not, one of the rowdy spirits who "ragged" Lort
Mansell, the Master of Trinity.[4] He certainly annoyed the dons by
keeping a bear as a pet, and asserting that he intended the animal to "sit
for a fellowship." But the most characteristic picture, after all, is that
which he draws (selecting his solicitor, of all persons in the world, for
his confidant) of his mode of reducing his flesh.
"I wear _seven_ waistcoats, and a great Coat, run and play cricket in
this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the
bath daily, eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher's Meat in 24
hours.... By these means my ribs display Skin of no great Thickness,
and my clothes have been taken in nearly _half a yard_."
That is the closing passage of a letter which begins with the confession
that "_Wine_ and _women_ have _dished_ your _humble servant_." The two
statements, taken in conjunction, furnish two-thirds of the picture. The
remaining third of it may be deduced and constructed from the verses which
Byron had then written or was then writing.
It might be tempting to see in the period of dissipation a disappointed
lover's desperate attempt to escape from an ineffaceable recollection; and
the view might be supported by Byron's own subsequent declaration that "a
violent, though _pure_, love and passion," was "the then romance of the
most romantic period of my life." Undergraduate excesses, however, rarely
require such recondite explanations; and Byron's reminiscences had, as we
shall see, been coloured by intervening events. All the contemporary
evidence that one can gather goes to show that they were inexact; that,
though he had been hard hit by Mary Chaworth's disdainful reception of his
suit, he did not mope, but, holding up his head, was in a fair way to live
his trouble down; and that his theory of himself, put forward in the
well-known lines in "Childe Harold":
"_And I must from this land begone
Because I cannot love but one_"
is an after thought entirely inconsistent with his practices as a
Cambridge undergraduate.
One would be constrained to suspect that, even if the early poems
addressed to Mary Chaworth stood alone. There are not many of them, and
they lack the intensity of passion--the impression of all possible hopes
irremediably blighted--which "The Dream" reveals. They strike one as a
little stiff and artificial, as though the poet had tried to express, not
so much what he actually felt, as what he considered that a man in his
position ought to feel. That is particularly the case with the poems of
the first period. There are boasts in them which we know to have been
quite unwarranted by the circumstances of the case. The poet pictures
himself as one who might disturb domestic peace if he chose, but refrains,
being merciful as he is strong:
"_Perhaps his peace I could destroy,
And spoil the blisses that await him;
Yet let my rival smile in joy,
For thy dear sake, I cannot hate him._"
The boasts there, we see, are the prelude of resignation; and, a line or
two further on, resignation is followed by the resolution to forget:
"_Then, fare thee well, deceitful Maid,
'Twere vain and fruitless to regret thee;
Nor Hope nor Memory yield their aid,
But Pride may teach me to forget thee._"
That is very conventional--hardly less conventional than the Elegy on
Margaret Parker--a sentimental "prelude to life," one would judge, of
quite an ordinary kind. And, as has been said, the sentimental utterance
does not stand alone. Other verses, hardly less sentimental, addressed to
several other ladies, were, at the same time, pouring from Byron's pen.
Burgage Manor, a house which his mother had taken at Southwell, near
Nottingham, was his vacation home. He fled from his home, from time to
time, because of Mrs. Byron's incurable habit of rattling the fire-irons
in order to draw attention to his faults; but he returned at intervals,
and stayed long enough to form a considerable circle of friends--friends,
be it noted, who belonged not to "the county" but to the professional
society of the town.
The county did not "call" to any appreciable extent. A few of the men
called on Byron himself; but none of the women called on Mrs.
Byron--whether because her reputation for rattling the fire-irons and
hurling the tongs had reached them, or because, on general principles,
they did not think her good enough to mix with them. Byron, as was
natural, resented their attitude and refused to return visits which
implied a slight upon his mother. Whatever his own disputes with her, he
would not have her snubbed by the local magnates, or himself enter their
doors on sufferance while she was excluded from them. He mixed instead
with the clergy, the doctors, the lawyers, the retired colonels, and
flirted with their sisters and daughters. In that set he moved as a triton
among the minnows, fluttering the dovecotes of Southwell pretty much as,
at a later date, Praed, fresh from Eton, fluttered the dovecotes of
Teignmouth. He could not dance, of course, owing to his lameness; but he
could distinguish himself in amateur theatricals, and he could write
verses.
His success in the Southwell drawing-rooms and boudoirs was the first
reward of his success in resisting and repelling the encroachments of the
flesh. The struggle was one which he had to renew at intervals throughout
his life; but his "crowning mercy" was the victory of this date. He
emerged from it slim, elegant, and strikingly handsome. He rejoiced, and
the girls of Southwell rejoiced with him. They understood, as well as he
did, that it is difficult for a man to be fat and sentimental at one and
the same time; that there is something ludicrously incongruous in the
picture of a fat boy writing sentimental verses and professing to pine
away for love. And they liked him to write sentimental verses to them, and
he was quite willing to do so. He was, at this time, the sort of young man
who will write verses to any girl who will give him a keepsake--the sort
of young man to whom almost every girl will give a keepsake on condition
that he will write verses to her.
He wrote lines, for instance, "to a lady who presented to the author a
lock of hair braided with his own and appointed a night in December to
meet him in the garden." Nothing is known of her except that her name was
Mary, and that she was neither Mary Duff nor Mary Chaworth, but a third
Mary "of humble station." Southwell, when it saw those verses, was
shocked. It seemed highly improper to Southwell that maidens of humble
station should be encouraged to presume by such attentions on the part of
noblemen. Probably it was on this occasion that the Reverend John Becher,
Vicar of Rumpton, Notts, expostulated with the poet for
"_Deigning to varnish scenes that shun the day
With guilty lustre and with amorous lay._"
But Byron kept Mary's lock of hair, and showed it, together with her
portrait, to his friends and wrote:
"_Thro' hours, thro' years, thro' time 'twill cheer--
My hope in gloomy moments raise;
In life's last conflict 'twill appear,
And meet my fond, expiring gaze._"
To Mary Chaworth herself Byron could hardly have said more, but he was, in
fact, at this time, saying the same sort of thing to all and sundry. Just
the same sentiment recurs in the lines addressed "To a lady who presented
the author with the velvet band which bound her tresses":
"_Oh! I will wear it next my heart;
'Twill bind my soul in bonds to thee:
From me again 'twill ne'er depart,
But mingle in the grave with me._"
Yet if Byron proposes to be faithful for ever to this un-named lady, he
proposes, at the same time, to be equally faithful to a lady who can be
identified as Miss Anne Houson:
"_With beauty like yours, oh, how vain the contention!
Thus lowly I sue for forgiveness before you;--
At once to conclude such a fruitless dissension,
Be false, my sweet Anne, when I cease to adore you!_"
And then there are other lines--innumerable other lines which would also
have to be quoted if the treatment of the subject were to be
encyclopædic--lines to Marion, lines to Caroline, lines to a beautiful
Quaker, lines to Miss Julia Leacroft, whose brother, the fire-eating
Captain John Leacroft remonstrated with Byron, and, according to Moore,
even went so far as to challenge him, on account of his pointed attentions
to his sister: lines, finally, to M.S.G. who would appear, if verse could
be accepted as autobiography, to have offered to yield to Byron, but to
have been spared because of his tender regard for her fair fame:
"_I will not ease my tortured heart,
By driving dove-ey'd peace from thine;
Rather than such a sting impart,
Each thought presumptuous I resign._
"_At least from guilt shalt thou be free,
No matron shall thy shame reprove;
Though cureless pangs may prey on me,
No martyr shalt thou be to love._"
With that citation we may quit the subject. Not one of the sets of
verses--with the single exception of the set addressed to Miss
Leacroft--has any discoverable story attached to it. All of them--or
nearly all of them--have the air of celebrating some profound attachment
from which no escape is to be looked for on this side of the grave.
Byron's later conception of himself as a man who had loved but one had not
crept into his poetry yet. He had not even begun to strike the pose of the
Childe impelled to "visit scorching climes beyond the sea" because the one
he loved "could ne'er be his."
The idea, indeed, of a man fleeing the country in 1809 because he had
loved in vain in 1804 would not, in any case, carry conviction. Even to a
poet the idea could hardly have presented itself without some definite
renewal of the memories. They were revived, in fact, at a dinner party, in
1808, of which we find an account in one of Byron's letters to Hodgson:
"I was seated near a woman to whom, when a boy, I was as much attached
as boys generally are, and more than a man should be. I knew this
before I went, and was determined to be valiant and converse with
_sang froid_; but instead I forgot my valour and my nonchalance, and
never opened my lips even to laugh, far less to speak, and the lady
was almost as absurd as myself, which made both the object of more
observation than if we had conducted ourselves with easy indifference.
You will think all this great nonsense; if you had seen it, you would
have thought it still more ridiculous. What fools we are! We cry for a
plaything which, like children, we are never satisfied with till we
break open, though, like them, we cannot get rid of it by putting it
on the fire."
That is the prose record of the meeting, and there is also a record in
verse. There are lines "to a lady on being asked my reason for quitting
England in the Spring"; there is the piece beginning, "Well! thou art
happy":
"_Mary, adieu! I must away:
While thou art blest I'll not repine;
But near thee I can never stay;
My heart would soon again be thine._"
And also:
"_In flight I shall be surely wise,
Escaping from temptation's snare;
I cannot view my Paradise
Without the wish of dwelling there._"
Poor stuff, as poetry, it will be agreed. Any one who wrote poetry at all
might have written it. The sentiment rendered in it is just the sentiment
which any sentimental youth would have felt to be proper to the occasion.
We can find in it, at most, only the faint fore-running shadow of the
Byronic pose. It rings very insincerely if we set it beside the lines in
which Walter Savage Landor, at about the same period, commemorated a
similar moment of emotion:
"_Rose Aylmer, whom these waking eyes
May weep but never see;
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee._"
In that comparison, most decidedly, all the advantage is with
Landor--inevitably, because his were the feelings of a man, whereas
Byron's were the feelings of a boy. He was only twenty, and his age is the
explanation of a good deal. It explains his startled timidity, described
in the letter to Hodgson, in a novel, romantic situation. It explains his
hugging his grief as a precious possession on no account to be let go. It
also explains the zest with which, when grief had had its sacred hour, he
could turn from it and throw himself into other activities.
He rejoiced in the pose, only outlined as yet, which was presently to make
him the most interesting man (to women at all events) in Europe; but he
also rejoiced in his youth. He flirted, as we have seen; he took part in
amateur theatrical performances; he engaged energetically in most of the
sports of the day, fencing with Angelo, boxing with Gentleman Jackson,
swimming the Thames from Lambeth to the Tower; he accumulated debts with
the fine air of a man heaping Pelion on Ossa; he flung down his defiant
challenge to the literary bigwigs in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";
he drew his plans for the grand tour. The world, in short, was just then
"so full of a number of things" that Mary Chaworth's importance in it can
easily be, as it has often been, exaggerated.
Presently we shall see Byron exaggerating it; and we shall also see how he
came to do so--how the boy's occasional pose became the determining
reality of the man's life. But before we come to that, we must turn back.
CHAPTER V
REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS"
One watches the swelling of Byron's indebtedness with morbid interest. It
is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a
city. Already, in his second term at Cambridge, as we have seen, he
besought his sister to pledge her credit for his loans. At the beginning
of his third year, we find him making a confession to his solicitor:
"My debts amount to three thousand, three hundred to Jews, eight
hundred to Mrs. B. of Nottingham, to coachmaker and other tradesmen a
thousand more, and these must be much increased before they are
lessened."
They were increased before they were lessened--unless the explanation be
that Byron only told the truth about them in instalments. Three months
later this is his confession to the Reverend John Becher:
"_Entre nous_, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, _everything_ inclusive,
will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one."
But, even so, the high-water mark is not yet reached. Towards the end of
the same year, when Byron is contemplating his "grand tour," he once more
calls his solicitor into council:
"You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds,
and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out,
with credit on a Bengal agent. This you must manage for me."
A pleasant commission, which seems to have led to a reference to Mrs.
Byron, who made a luminous suggestion:
"I wish to God he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He
must marry a woman of _fortune_ this Spring; love matches is all
nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents God has given him. He is an
English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation."
It was a matter-of-fact proposal, worthy of the canny Scotswoman who made
it--a proof that, even when she threw the tongs at her son, she still had
his interests at heart; but nothing came of it. Very likely Byron, at this
date knew no heiresses; and even his mother was not matter-of-fact enough
to expect him to advertise for one, even for the purpose of avoiding the
necessity of selling Newstead. There was still the resource of borrowing a
little more, and of making the loans go as far as possible by retaining
the money for personal expenses, instead of applying it to the payment of
debt; and something of that sort seems to have been done. Scrope Davies
lent Byron £4800; and yet Mrs. Byron had occasion to write:
"There is some Trades People at Nottingham that will be completely
ruined if he does not pay them, which I would not have happen for a
whole world."
Moreover, though Byron himself talked vaguely to Hanson of the possibility
of his marriage with "a golden Dolly," he was at an age at which a young
man does not readily marry any woman with whom he is not in love. Whether
he was or was not, at that time, in love with Mrs. Chaworth,[5] he
certainly was not in love with any one else; and he was enjoying himself
and "having his fling," after the manner of gilded youth. His "domestic
female companion," to use Gibbon's charming phrase, was a professional
daughter of joy who travelled about with him in male attire. He even
brought her to Newstead, when he took possession of the Abbey on the
expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthen's tenancy. That may have been one
reason--though it need not necessarily have been the only one--for his
refusal to let his mother join him there. It would certainly have been a
valid reason for postponing matrimony.
Around those Newstead revels a good deal of fantastic legend circles; and
the facts concerning them are hardly to be disentangled from the myths.
"Childe Harold" starts with them:--
_Ah! me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree._
"Childe Harold," however, in spite of the fact that it was first called
"Childe Buron," is a poem, not a deposition. The picture, with its
"Paphian girls" and the rest of it--
_Where superstition once had made her den,
Now Paphian girls were wont to sing and smile,
And monks might deem their time was come agen,
If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men_,
is not necessarily faithful because the note of contrast which it sounds
is of the essence of the poem. But, on the other hand, the excuses and
explanations by means of which Moore and Cordy Jeaffreson attempt to
palliate and minimise the supposed assertions of the poem are somewhat
less than convincing.
The revels, say these apologists, cannot have been so very dreadful
because the Newstead guests sometimes included some of the local clergy,
and because some of the young men who engaged in them afterwards took
orders. The obvious answer to that is that the revellers may very well
have moderated their revelry on the occasions on which clergymen were
present--and that those of them who afterwards became pillars of the
Church may not, at that date, have got the old Adam into complete
subjection. Nor is a great deal gained by the contention that the part of
the supposed "Paphian girls" was, in fact, sustained by Byron's "domestic
female companion," and by the Newstead cook and the Newstead housemaid. To
say this is merely to protest that the alleged Paphians did not really
come from Paphos, but from some other island in the same neighbourhood.
A letter written by Charles Skinner Matthews to his sister is the only
contemporary chronicle of the proceedings. There is a confirmation of his
account, together with some supplementary details, in a letter written,
long afterwards, by Byron to John Murray. Remembering the ages and
circumstances of the revellers--and remembering also that Moore's
information was derived from some of them--we will try to get as near to
the truth as the procurable evidence allows.
Byron, one must always bear in mind, had not yet conquered his place in
county society, or in what is now called "smart" society. His mother's
eccentricities and his guardian's chilly attitude had, as we have seen,
kept him out of it. He actually knew no peer who could or would introduce
him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. The people whom he knew
at home were chiefly provincial people of the professional classes. At
Cambridge he had got into a fast, though not an unintellectual, set. He
was very young, and he had plenty of credit, if not much ready money; and
here was the "venerable pile" of Newstead--not the less venerable because
it was dilapidated--at his disposal as a playground, and a place in which
to dispense hospitality.
Naturally he wanted to show Newstead to his friends, whom he had never
been able to entertain at home before. Naturally, having credit, he used
it to fit up and furnish as much of Newstead as was necessary for their
comfortable accommodation, not troubling to foresee the day--though he
would not have had to look very far ahead in order to foresee it--when the
bailiffs would be put in to seize the goods in default of payment.
Naturally, as Mrs. Byron was so addicted to rattling the tongs and
throwing the fire-irons at him, he did not want her there. Naturally, his
college friends having fast tastes and habits, and no ladies of their own
station being of the party, the method of their life did not follow the
conventional round of the ordinary house-party. The pet bear, and the pet
wolf, which guarded the entrances, were only symbols of the unusual and
extravagant state of things within.
Breakfast, in theory, could be served at any hour. The hour actually
preferred by the majority of the party was one P.M. Matthews, who
generally came down between eleven and twelve, "was esteemed a prodigy of
early rising." Any one, he says, who had wanted to breakfast as early as
ten "would have been rather lucky to find any of the servants up." Not
until two P.M., as a rule, was the breakfast cleared away. The amusements
of the afternoon--which Matthews euphemistically calls the morning--were
"reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room,
practising with pistols in the hall, walking, riding, cricket, sailing on
the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf." Dinner was between
seven and eight, and then--another euphemism most proper in a letter to a
sister--"the evening diversions may be easily conceived."
Those evening diversions consisted, in the first instance of dressing up
and drinking. The beverages, according to Byron himself, were "burgundy,
claret, champagne, and what not," quaffed not only out of ordinary
glasses, but also out of a loving-cup fashioned from a skull which had
been dug up in the Newstead grounds. As for the dressing-up; "A set of
monkish dresses," says Matthews, "which had been provided, with all the
proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c., often gave a variety to
our appearance and to our pursuits," which pursuits consisted, in Byron's
words, of "buffooning all round the house in our conventual garments."
That Matthews speaks of tonsures as if they were articles of dress is
neither here nor there; and there is no importance to be attached to his
omission of all reference to the "buffooning." We know from Hobhouse that
he played his part in it, and that one of the amusements of this brilliant
young Fellow of Downing was to hide himself in a stone coffin in the Long
Gallery and groan, by way of alarming his brother revellers. Evidently the
Monks of Newstead, while taking some hints from the profane members of the
Medmenham Hell Fire Club, carried out, to the best of their ability, the
traditions of the Monks of Thelema. "Fays ce que voudras" might have been
their motto; and the doing of what they wished appears to have involved
and included the extension of invitations to the cook and the housemaid to
participate in their pleasures. Moore says so, not as one who makes a
charge, but as one who makes an admission to rebut a graver charge, and is
full of sympathy for the exuberance of lusty youth. Moralists must make
what they can of the story, and apportion censure and indulgence as they
think just.
The excesses, at any rate, whatever their degree and nature, did not fill
Byron's life. He was getting on with his poetry in spite of them, though
it would be too much to say that he had yet proved his title to be called
a poet.
"Hours of Idleness" had appeared while he was at Cambridge. The interest
of that volume, nowadays, is far more biographical than poetical. When one
has inferred from it that Byron did not pass through the University with a
heart bowed down by the loss of Mary Chaworth, but flirted with a long
series of the belles of Southwell, one has said nearly all that there is
to say. The poems themselves, as the quotations given amply demonstrate,
are no better than the general run of undergraduate verse composition.
They are purely imitative; no new note rings in them. One is not surprised
that Lord Carlisle, on receiving a presentation copy, was in a greater
hurry to acknowledge than to read it, and merely remarked, in his
acknowledgment that young men were better occupied in writing poetry than
in devoting their valuable time to women and horses.
"Tolerably handsome," was Byron's first verdict on that letter; but he
seems to have felt snubbed when he read it over a second time. Lord
Carlisle's opinions, he wrote to Miss Pigot, were nothing to him, but his
guardian must not be "insolent." If he were insolent, he should be
gibbeted, just as Butler of Harrow had been gibbeted. In fact, and to sum
up:
"Perhaps the Earl '_bears no brother near the throne_'--_if so_, I
will make his _sceptre_ totter _in his hands_."
Which shows that Byron's back was up, and that he was already in a
fighting mood when the famous review in the _Edinburgh_ introduced a
jarring note into the chorus of approbation.
The author of the attack was not Jeffrey, as Byron thought, but Brougham.
He had the excuse, for what it may be worth, that the poems had
indubitably been over-praised because they had appeared under the
signature of a nobleman. He, therefore, set out on the war path with the
truculent air of a man whose conscience requires him to bludgeon a
butterfly. The punishment, we cannot doubt, was very painful to the poet
whom Cambridge undergraduates and Southwell belles had flattered; and the
instant question for him was: Would he take his punishment lying down, or
would he take it fighting?
That question, however, was not long in doubt. The Byrons were a fighting
race; and the poet had inherited their love of fighting. Just as he had
fought Lord Calthorpe at Harrow for calling him an atheist, so now he
would fight the _Edinburgh_ critic for calling him a fool. And he would
fight him with his own weapons. Let him have three bottles of claret to
prime him, and then he would strip for the fray, and would "take on," not
the reviewer only, but every one whom the reviewer had praised, and every
one whom he himself disliked, or thought he might dislike if he knew him
better. So he emptied his three bottles, and set to work on "English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers," and having written twenty lines of it, "felt
better."
It is the poem in which his genius first begins to be apparent. Most of
the judgments expressed in it were unjust--most of them were afterwards
retracted by their author; but that does not matter. One does not expect
sound criticism from poets--least of all does one expect it from poets of
one-and-twenty. The essence of the thing is that now, in "English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers" a new personality spoke--and spoke loud enough to
be heard.
The note of Byron--the note which gained him his large and attentive
audience--was his reckless audacity. He was not afraid of saying things;
he did not wrap them up, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, but said them in
plain language which all the world could understand--said them, moreover,
in a manner which made them appear true even to those who thought, or
wished to think, them false. His readers never knew what he would be
saying next. They only knew that, whatever it was, he would say it
effectively, and, as has already been remarked, with the air of one who
damned the consequences. That was the note which was, in later years, to
ring through "Don Juan." We can already hear it ringing, as it were in
anticipation, through the couplets of "English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers."
Many examples might be cited; for the Satire, after the way of Satires, is
almost entirely composed of damnatory clauses. Any piece of gossip was
good enough for Byron to lay hold of and use as a missile when running
amok among literary reputations. The best instance, however, may be found
in the passage in which he turned and rent Carlisle.
His original intention was to make himself pleasant to his guardian. He
had no particular reason for liking him, but he had no definite case
against him. There was the letter, of course, in which Carlisle had
patronised the poet instead of praising his poetry; but he had got over
his irritation about that, and did not bear malice; and so he prepared for
publication these lines of fulsome eulogy:
"_Ah, who would take their titles from their rhymes?
On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,
And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle._"
But then, before the day of publication, occurred his quarrel with
Carlisle. He thought that his guardian ought to have volunteered to
introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords; he had the more
reason for thinking so because his guardian was the only Peer of the Realm
whom he knew. Carlisle, however, did not do so, contenting himself with
instructing his ward as to the formalities to be fulfilled. The slight,
whether intentional or not, was keenly felt--the more keenly because Byron
was, at the moment, at war with all the world except Carlisle. _Et tu,
Brute_, may very well have been his reflection.
So he had misjudged Carlisle. So Carlisle was as bad as other
people--worse, indeed, because better things might reasonably have been
expected from him. Very well. It was to be war between them, was it? Those
who played at bowls must look out for rubbers. Carlisle should see what
kind of an antagonist he had provoked. He had threatened to make his
sceptre totter in his hands. Now he would show that he could do it. So he
struck out the lines of eulogy, and substituted:
"_Yet did or Taste or Reason sway the times,
Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes!
Roscommon! Sheffield! With your spirits fled,
No future laurels deck a noble head;
No Muse will cheer with renovating smile
The paralytic puling of Carlisle._"
Such was the Parthian shaft; and Byron, having discharged it, shook the
dust of England from off his feet, and departed on the grand tour.
CHAPTER VI
THE GRAND TOUR--FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN
The glory has long since departed from the grand tour. We all take it
nowadays, with less and less sense of adventure, and more and more
expectation of home comforts. Sir Henry Lunn has pegged out the course,
and stationed lecturers along it at intervals, to prevent us from
confounding Scylla and Charybdis with Sodom and Gomorrah. They stir
appropriate emotions in our breasts like stokers making up a fire. We play
bridge in the evening on steamers "replete with every modern convenience";
and we are back again, in about six weeks, with a smattering of
second-hand culture which goes the way of all smatterings in a very brief
period of time. It is a shadowy, unreal, unsatisfactory business--a poor
imitation of the grand tour as our forefathers knew it.
Some of them, no doubt, travelled frivolously and superficially. The Earl
of Carlisle did so when he and Fox, as Samuel Rogers tells us, "travelled
from Paris to Lyons for the express purpose of buying waistcoats and,
during the whole journey, talked of nothing else." But there was plenty of
emotion in travel for those who cared for it--a real impression of a
widening horizon on which unusual figures might be expected to appear--a
sense of escaping from the familiar crowd and plunging into an unknown
world in which anything might happen. The temptation was strong for the
traveller of temperament to strike an attitude and say: "Behold me! The
old moorings were impossible; the old lights gave no guidance. I prefer to
be adrift on a strange sea, seeking I know not what. Travel is my escape
from life. A woman tempted me, and tortured me, and so, unless a woman
heals the wound a woman gave----"
Chateaubriand sought the Orient in that spirit. Disgust and disillusion,
as he tells us, drove him forth. Pauline de Beaumont was dead, and Madame
de Chateaubriand was a woman hard to live with. He needed the consolations
of religion; he needed to meditate at the tomb of Christ. Above all he
needed, when his meditations had fortified his mind, to meet Natalie de
Noailles-Mouchy in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra. He met her
there, and travelled with her for three months in Spain, and presently
found that he had only plucked yet another Dead Sea apple. And so he
cried: "Behold me!" Similarly, in spite of the differences, with Byron.
It was a fixed article of faith with Chateaubriand that Byron had
plagiarised his personality without acknowledgment. It was an act of
envious vengeance, he said, for his own neglect to reply to a letter which
Byron had written him while a schoolboy. That accusation, of course, is
incredible and may be dismissed; but the resemblance between the two men
was nevertheless as close as the differences of race allowed. Byron was as
distinctly British, at intervals, as Chateaubriand was, at all times,
distinctly French; and their points of view were to diverge widely as they
grew older. Chateaubriand, an artistic Catholic, was to become one of the
pillars of the Holy Alliance. Byron was to do more than any other man
except Canning to pull the pillars of that temple down. But, in the
meantime, the likeness was striking. There was about them both an equal
air of cultivated gloom, an equal tendency to introspection, an equally
intense interest in their personalities--that sense of the significance of
the ego which was to be of the essence of the Romantic Movement--an equal
readiness, as has been re-marked, to exclaim: Behold me!
The likeness is specially striking in the case of their journeys to the
Orient. They sailed the same seas in the same spirit--with the one
difference that Byron, who had a deadly hatred of certain kinds of
hypocrisy, made no pretence in his quest for peace, of looking to and fro
between love and religion. In both cases alike, disgust for life was
understood to have given the impulsion to the journey. A leading incident
in both journeys was, as Byron bluntly puts it, "a passion for a married
woman." Neither passion gave the lover any lasting satisfaction. Both
passions were proclaimed in enigmatic pæans to the world.
The two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" which chronicle the
journey are also the record of the beginning of the Byronic pose. The
picture of the Childe is the picture of René, with a difference--the
difference being that, whereas Chateaubriand could never, even in a work
of art, depreciate himself, Byron rejoiced in doing so. For the rest, the
Childe was "tameless and swift and proud," and worthless, and weary, and
disillusioned, and disgusted. He had "spent his days in riot most
uncouth": he had "felt the fulness of satiety." It was well that he had
not won the woman whom he loved because his kiss "had been polution unto
aught so chaste." His boon companions were only "flatterers of the festal
hour," and "none did love him, not his lemans dear." Wherefore behold him,
on the Lisbon packet, in flight from himself, and seeking his "escape from
life."
That is the picture; that, as perhaps it would be better to put it, is the
pose. It was to become a sincere and natural posture before the end; but
it is impossible, at this early stage, to take it very seriously. Byron
would himself have been the first to repudiate the suggestion that such
men as Matthews, Hobhouse, and Hodgson were "heartless parasites of
present cheer." He had more respect for Matthews than for any man of his
acquaintance; Hodgson was to be his most regular correspondent, and
Hobhouse the chosen companion of his journey. Moreover, he was only
twenty-one--an age at which a young man is eager to see the world and
needs no excuse for setting out to do so. His conception of himself as a
forlorn exile impelled to wander because the world has betrayed and
trifled with him is, in the main, a young man's literary affectation.
An affectation, no doubt, for which certain realities had furnished a
hint. The fear of impending pecuniary embarrassment may sometimes have
given the sound of revelry a hollow ring. The sarcasm of the _Edinburgh_,
though repaid in kind, had certainly left a thin skin sore. The icy
politeness of Carlisle had chilled an expansive heart, and given Byron the
impression that he was regarded as an intruder in his own domain.
Conjoined with his mother's nagging, it had made something of a
three-cornered quarrel from which it was good to escape. He had also found
himself more sentimental than he ought to be about Mary Chaworth. Here, at
any rate, was something to exaggerate--a foundation of bad temper on which
a superstructure of pessimism might be raised. Byron duly raised it, for
literary purposes. But he had his high spirits as well as his low spirits;
and the farewell lines which he sent from Falmouth to Hodgson suggest
anything rather than a heart bowed down with woe.
"_Now at length we're off for Turkey,
Lord knows when we shall come back!
Breezes foul and tempests murky
May unship us in a crack.
But since life at most a jest is,
As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
Then laugh on--as I do now.
Laugh at all things,
Great and small things,
Sick or well, at sea or shore;
While we're quaffing,
Let's have laughing--
Who the devil asks for more?--
Some good wine! and who would lack it,
Ev'n on board the Lisbon packet?_"
Those verses, quite as much as "'Tis done, and shivering in the gale"--and
much more than anything in "Childe Harold,"--indicate the frame of mind in
which Byron wished his native land good-night. He was travelling with all
the paraphernalia of the grand tourist--with more servants than he could
afford, and with the hearty, matter-of-fact John Cam Hobhouse for his
companion to keep him out of mischief. Whatever he fled from, adventure
was what he was looking for--not only the adventures which belong to the
exploration of barbarous countries, but also those which are to be
encountered in the boudoirs of garrison towns.
He landed at Lisbon and went to Cintra. He rode across Spain to Seville
and Cadiz. He proceeded to Gibraltar, to Malta, to Albania, to Athens, and
thence to Smyrna and the Dardanelles. He returned to Athens, and spent
some time in exploring the interior of Greece. That, in outline, was the
itinerary; and there were two adventures of which the letters to Hodgson
show him to have been particularly proud. He swam the Hellespont, in
imitation of Leander--a feat of which he boasts, over and over again, in
every letter to every correspondent--and he indulged in "a passion for a
married woman at Malta."
Nor was that his only passion. If it was the only passion which he
felt--which is doubtful--it certainly was not the only passion which he
inspired. "Lord Byron," says Hobhouse, in his matter-of-fact way, "is, of
course, very popular with all the ladies, as he is very handsome, amusing,
and generous; but his attentions to all and sundry generally end, as on
this occasion, in _rixæ femininæ_." We shall come to that story in a
moment. It is preceded by a story of which the hint is in the lines
beginning:
"_Yet are Spain's maids no race of Amazons,
But formed for all the witching arts of love_:"
a story of which the memory is in "Don Juan":
"_'Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue
By female lips and eyes--that is I mean,
When both the teacher and the taught are young,
As was the case, at least, where I have been._"
It happened at Seville, where the travellers, as Hobhouse writes, "made
the acquaintance of Admiral Cordova, with whose daughter Byron contrived
to fall in love at very short notice."
Admiral Cordova was the Admiral who put up the fight which gained Sir John
Jervis the title of Earl Saint Vincent. Byron had an introduction to the
family, met Señorita Cordova at the theatre, and was invited to escort her
home. It is not quite clear from the correspondence whether it was
Señorita Cordova or some other lady who quarrelled with him because he
would not give her the ring which he wore, as pledge of his affection; nor
is it certain whether the ring was, or was not, a memento of Mary
Chaworth. Whatever its origin, it was to be yielded up at the hour of the
"passion for a married woman"; and meanwhile there was another little
incident of which Byron speaks, of all places in the world, in a letter to
his mother:
"We lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies.... The eldest
honoured your _unworthy_ son with very particular attention, embracing
him with great tenderness at parting ... after cutting off a lock of
his hair, and presenting him with one of her own, about three feet in
length, which I send and beg you will retain till my return.... She
offered me a share of her apartment, which my _virtue_ induced me to
decline."
That is all, and it is of no importance. The next stage was Gibraltar, and
it is there, and on the voyage thence to Malta, that we get our first
glimpse of Byron from the pen of an observer who observed, not as a matter
of course, but as a matter of curiosity, and had a turn for picturesque
description.
John Galt, afterwards famous as a Scotch novelist, was at Gibraltar when
Byron arrived there. He had been sent to the Levant by a firm of traders
to ascertain how far British goods could be exploited in defiance of the
Berlin and Milan Decrees. He was to try hard, though in vain, to introduce
such goods into the Greek archipelago, and to smuggle them into Spain.
Half man of action and half dreamer, he went about denouncing priests and
kings, and exhorting the British Government to seize all the islands
everywhere for the supposed advantage of British commerce. Byron,
condescendingly asking Hodgson to review one of his books favourably,
describes him, with more or less of justice, as "a cock-brained man," and,
remembering him at a later date, told Lady Blessington that he "could not
awe him into a respect sufficiently profound for my sublime self, either
as a peer or an author."
This means, of course, that Galt, though he perceived the pose, did not
abase himself in ecstasy before it. Seeing that he was a man of thirty,
whereas Byron was only just of age, it was hardly to be expected that he
would. Moreover, as a Scotsman, he would naturally take the side of the
_Edinburgh_ and maintain that Byron had done nothing to be conceited
about. So he observed Byron--and we may be grateful to him for doing
so--in a spirit of criticism and detachment.
"His physiognomy," Galt writes, "was prepossessing and intelligent,
but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then
thought, with a degree of affectation in it, probably first assumed
for picturesque effect and energetic expression, but which I
afterwards discovered was undoubtedly the occasional scowl of some
unpleasant recollection: it was certainly
disagreeable--forbidding--but still the general cast of his features
was impressed with elegance and character."
That was the first impression, and the second impression was not more
favourable:
"In the little bustle and process of embarking their luggage, his
lordship affected, as it seemed to me, more aristocracy than befitted
his years or the occasion; and I then thought of his singular scowl,
and suspected him of pride and irascibility. The impression that
evening was not agreeable, but it was interesting; and that forehead
mark, the frown, was calculated to awaken curiosity and beget
conjectures."
Galt, in short, contrasted Byron unfavourably with Hobhouse, whom he found
"a cheerful companion" and "altogether an advantageous specimen of a
well-educated English gentleman;" but it was Byron who intrigued him. He
noticed what Byron ate--"no animal food, but only bread and
vegetables"--and he reflected that "he had not acquired his knowledge of
the world by always dining so sparingly." He even found his way "by
cautious circumvallations into his intimacy"--though not very far into it,
for "his uncertain temper made his favour precarious"; and finally we find
him, as if in return for this precarious favour, drawing a picture of
Byron which really can be called Byronic. The scene is the ship which
conveys them both from Gibraltar to Malta:
"When the lights were placed, he made himself a man forbid, took his
station on the railing between the pegs on which the sheets are
belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in silence,
enamoured, it may be, of the moon. All these peculiarities, with his
caprices, and something inexplicable in the cast of his metaphysics,
while they served to awaken interest, contributed little to conciliate
esteem. He was often strangely rapt--it may have been from his genius;
and, had its grandeur and darkness been then divulged, susceptible of
explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, round him the
sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amidst the shrouds and rattlings,
churming an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional,
suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross. He was as
a mystery in a winding sheet, crowned with a halo."
One quotes the passage in full because it is the earliest coloured picture
of the theatrical Byron--the fatal man of gloom and splendour on whom so
much limelight was presently to be thrown. Whether Byron was posing for
Galt--or whether Galt magnified the pose in the light of subsequent
events--it is, of course, at this date, impossible to say. Perhaps both
things happened, and the picture owes a little to each of them. At all
events the beginning of Byronism--of the outward, visible Byronism, that
is to say--is there. It is just the picture which we feel we have a right
to look for of the fatal man divining the doom which he is unable to
resist--alone in the midst of the crowd--his own personality creating a
void around him--proceeding to his first "passion for a married woman."
That passion awaited him as soon as he landed at Malta. The woman who
inspired it was Mrs. Spencer Smith--the "Florence" of "Childe Harold:"
"_Sweet Florence! could another ever share
This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine._"
But Mrs. Spencer Smith has a story of her own which it is worth while to
turn aside and tell.
CHAPTER VII
FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH
Mrs. Spencer Smith was the daughter of an Austrian Ambassador and the wife
of an English Minister Plenipotentiary. "Married unhappily, yet has never
been impeached in point of character," says Byron in a letter to his
mother. There are no details forthcoming about that, however. All that one
can affirm is that her husband only appears as a shadowy figure in the
background of her adventures, leaving the leading _rôle_ to other men,
while he serves his country at the other end of Europe.
He was a younger brother of Sir Sidney Smith, who had checked Napoleon's
victorious career at Acre. Napoleon, it is said by some French writers,
loathed the very name of Smith after that calamity, held all the Smiths
jointly and severally responsible for it, and swore to wreak his vengeance
on the first Smith who fell into his hands. Consequently, the same writers
add, when he heard that a Mrs. Smith was staying at Venice--a city then in
his power--he felt that his long-delayed hour of triumph had come, and
gave his orders accordingly.
That version of the story, however, is too good to be true. Mrs. Spencer
Smith, in fact, was suspected, whether rightly or wrongly, of having
played some part, as a secret agent, in some conspiracy against Napoleon.
She had been betrayed, or denounced; she was being watched; and she
walked, unaware of her danger, into the snare that had been set. Venice,
it had seemed to her, would be a safe place of refuge when the
over-running of northern Italy by the French armies made it awkward for
her to remain at the Baths of Valdagno, where she had been staying for the
benefit of her health. Her sister, Countess Attems, lived at Venice, and
she went to visit her.
She was young, accomplished, beautiful--"like one of those apparitions,"
says the Duchesse d'Abrantès, "which come to us in our happiest dreams."
She spoke seven languages, and looked down demurely--"a habit," the
Duchesse d'Abrantès continues, "which only added to her charms." A
Sicilian boy of twenty, the Marquis de Salvo, begged for an introduction,
was presented, and fell in love. He had hardly done so--he had not even
declared himself--when he lighted upon his chance of proving his devotion
by rendering help in time of trouble.
General Lauriston, Napoleon's aide-de-camp, arrived at Venice with a
commission to act as Military Governor in his pocket; and then the trouble
began. Mrs. Spencer Smith was sent for by the Chief of Police and
requested to leave the town and take a residence in the country. She had
hardly begun to look for one when there arrived four gendarmes, with the
intimation that she was to remain in her apartment, and that they were to
see that she did so. The Marquis de Salvo then volunteered to call on the
Chief of Police and inquire the meaning of this rigorous measure. The
Chief of Police first talked vaguely to him about Napoleon's prejudice
against the name of Smith, and then hinted that there might be more
specific reasons for his severity. He added that his orders were to
conduct Mrs. Smith under an escort to Milan; "and I rather fancy," he
concluded, "that she is to be detained in the fortress of Valenciennes."
That was the boy's chance. He was a boy in years, but a man in courage and
resource. He ran to Mrs. Spencer Smith, repeated what he had been told,
and promised that he would save her.
At first she hesitated. He would be taking a risk, she said, which he had
no right to take. He probably expected a reward which her "principles"
would not permit her to grant. But the boy, as it happened, was as
chivalrous as he was brave. Perhaps he loved noble actions for their own
sake. At all events he loved adventure; and here was the prospect of an
adventure such as rarely comes the way of a youth fresh from school. As
for the risks, he said, he did not fear them. As for reward, he would not
ask for any. If Mrs. Spencer Smith would let him save her she should be
saved. He had thought the matter out, and made his plans. All that was
necessary was that she should take a maid with her whom she could trust.
Everything else might be left to him.
Then Florence Spencer Smith thanked Salvo, and promised to accept his aid.
She too was of the age at which one is grateful to life for adventures;
and, if she must choose between the two evils, well then she would rather
be compromised than locked up. So she made sure of her maid, and got into
the carriage which the gendarmes provided. There were five of them,
including the brigadier; and Salvo sought, and obtained, leave to ride
with them in the vague character of "friend of the family." The gendarmes,
he found, were excellent fellows, quite unsuspicious, and very
sympathetic. The brigadier was specially sympathetic because he was lost
in admiration of Mrs. Smith's faithful maid; and Salvo, having carefully
thought out his coup, watched all the chances.
It had been agreed that Mrs. Smith should plead ill health, and ask to be
allowed to journey by short stages. No objections were raised--probably
because of the pleasure which the brigadier took in the society of the
maid--and the party halted, first at Verona, and then at Brescia. At
Verona nothing could be done. An Italian friend, whom Salvo implored to
meet and help him, failed to keep the appointment, guessing why he was
wanted, and fearing Napoleon's long arm. He must, therefore, act alone;
and the question was whether he could find a means of getting Mrs. Smith
on board a boat and across the Lake of Garda. Probably he could if he
could first see her alone and concert a scheme with her. So he galloped
off to the lake side, hired two boats, and bought a post chaise, in which
he proposed to drive Mrs. Smith up into the mountains, and over the
frontier into Austria. Then he galloped back, told the brigadier that he
was obliged to return to Venice, and begged to be allowed to say good-bye
to Mrs. Smith without witnesses.
The brigadier, who liked to be alone with the maid, could quite understand
that the marquis liked to be alone with the mistress. He winked a wicked
eye, called the marquis "a sad dog," and gave permission. Salvo winked
back at him, as if admitting the impeachment of sad doggedness, and, in
the brief interview which the brigadier supposed to be consecrated to
sentiment, told Mrs. Smith what he had plotted, and how she herself must
act.
He would return, after night-fall, with a rope ladder. In order to avoid
the suspicions of the inquisitive, he would make that rope ladder with his
own hands. He would pack it up into a parcel, and Mrs. Smith must lower a
piece of string with which to draw it up. The parcel would also contain a
boy's costume, as a disguise for her, and a dose of laudanum with which to
drug the maid's evening drink in case she were not a party to the
conspiracy. He would come again at eleven, wearing a cocked hat, and
enveloped in a military cloak. Mrs. Smith, understanding who was there,
must then make the ladder fast and climb down to him.
He came; and things happened more or less as he had planned them. The
maid, in particular, was magnificently loyal. She offered to attend her
mistress in her flight; and, when told that that could not be, she handed
out her mistress' jewels, helped in securing the ladder to the verandah,
promised to remove it after it had served its purpose, and then tossed off
the soporific of her own accord, so that it might be physically impossible
for her to answer questions for some hours to come--incidentally also, no
doubt, in order to give the brigadier the excuse which he would naturally
desire for acquitting her of all complicity in the escape.
Mrs. Smith descended the ladder half way, and then fell off it; but Salvo
had expected that. He caught her in his arms, and they got into their
carriage and were off. The gates of the town were closed; but Salvo
bluffed his way through them in an instant, with the help of his military
cloak and head-gear.
"What in thunder do you mean by keeping me waiting? I'm the colonel of the
twenty-fifth. You were warned to look out for me. You'll hear of this
again, my man. Open the gate at once, and let me through."
Thus the boy swore in the full-blooded military style of the period. The
gate was thrown open for him with profound apologies. He whipped up the
horses, and galloped to Salona, where the boats were ready. They embarked,
taking their carriage with them, and crossed to Riva. There they got into
the carriage again, and galloped on to Trent, where a sleepy official,
much in wrath at this disturbance of his slumbers, proceeded to make
trouble about their passports, which were only approximately in order. The
only course, since time pressed, and pursuers were on their track, was to
leave the chaise behind and slip away surreptitiously in a country cart
which an inn-keeper offered to sell them.
The pursuers, indeed, were hard upon their heels; but happily the morning
sun was in their eyes. The fugitives saw them before they were seen, and
drove their cart down from the mountain road through the forest to the
torrent, so that the horsemen missed them and rode past them. After that,
they abandoned their cart, and travelled by cross country roads and
mountain paths, continually in peril of arrest, but always escaping as if
by a miracle. A peasant, to whom they appealed for food and shelter,
proposed to conduct them to the nearest police station, but was melted to
tenderness by Mrs. Smith's tears and pitiful entreaties. They read the
offer of a reward for their capture posted on the walls. They hid
themselves for two days in a mountain chapel. They were stopped, and
questioned, and mistaken for other more romantic fugitives--an Italian
Princess who was said to have eloped with an Italian bookseller's
assistant. They disguised themselves as peasants, and travelled in the
midst of the real peasants' flocks of sheep. Not until after many days'
wanderings did they reach Austrian territory, declare their true
identity, and claim the protection of the law; and even so their troubles
were not over.
Austria, at that date, had not yet recovered either morally or materially
from the shock of Austerlitz, and dared not stand openly between Napoleon
and his prey. The fugitives had to be arrested before they could be saved.
Salvo was, for a while, locked up, like a criminal, in the deepest dungeon
of a Styrian Castle; and Mrs. Smith was smuggled out of the country, under
the name of Frau Müller--first to Riga, and thence to England, where Salvo
ultimately joined her. Queen Charlotte thanked him publicly for the
service so gallantly rendered to a British subject; and he made his best
bow and withdrew, remembering his promise to expect no other recompense.
Such is the story of Mrs. Smith's adventure as told, first by Salvo
himself, who wrote a book about it, and then by the Duchesse d'Abrantès,
who devoted a long section of her Memoirs to it. One repeats it, partly
for its own sake and partly because the romance of it explains how the
heroine of it appealed to Byron's imagination.
She was the first really interesting--or, at all events, the first really
remarkable--woman whom he had met. The women whom he had previously known
had been very conventional young persons of the upper middle classes. Even
Mary Chaworth had been _bourgeoise_, or must have seemed so in comparison
with Mrs. Spencer Smith. To meet her was to encounter, for the first time,
the amazing realities of life, and to find more romance in them than even
a poet dared to dream of without reality to prompt him. And she was
married, and it made no difference--or none except that, being married,
she had more liberty, and could be more audacious than a spinster. "Since
my arrival here," Byron writes--still to his mother--"I have had scarcely
any other companion." There is an unmistakable note of self-complacency in
the confession. Byron's "passion for a married woman" was evidently
signalling to him, as such a passion has signalled to many a young man
before and after him, that, now at last, he was grown up.
Galt says that the attachment was merely "Platonic." Possibly Galt was
right, though his evidence goes for nothing, seeing that Byron looked down
upon him from far too Olympian a height to be in the least likely to
confide in him. The impression which Mrs. Spencer Smith, from the little
that we know about her, gives is that of the type of the favourite heroine
of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones' more serious plays--a woman, that is to say,
who shows herself of a very "coming-on" disposition until a certain point
is reached, but then stops suddenly short, being frightened and abashed by
her own temerity. She asked Byron for his ring--the ring which the Spanish
lady had asked him for in vain--and he gave it to her. "Soon after this I
sailed for Malta, and there parted with both heart and ring," is his own
way of putting it; and as Galt knew that she had got the ring, there seem
to be grounds for the conjecture that she showed it and boasted of it.
Anything else, however, it would be idle to conjecture, even though we
have "Childe Harold" and sundry "Lines" to help us in the quest.
The suggestion in "Childe Harold" is that Mrs. Spencer Smith made love to
Byron in vain:
"_Fair Florence found, in sooth, with some amaze,
One who, 'twas said, still sighed to all he saw,
Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of her gaze----_"
The suggestion in the "Lines" is different:
"_Oh, lady! When I left the shore,
The distant shore which gave me birth,
I hardly thought to grieve once more,
To quit another spot on earth:_
"_Yet, here amidst this barren isle,
Where panting Nature droops the head,
Where only thou art seen to smile,
I view my parting hour with dread._"
We must make what we can of that; and it really matters very little what
we make of it. This "passion for a married woman" was an inevitable stage
of the sentimental pilgrimage. Byron was bound to halt there for a little
while, if not for long; and it was not to be expected that he would, like
Ulysses, stuff his ears with wool while passing the Siren's Isle. That is
not the way of poets, and that is not the way of youth. He was bound, too,
to fancy, for a moment, that the passion meant a great deal to him, even
though, in fact, it meant but little; for that also is the way of youth
and poets. And hardly less inevitable, though both of them knew that no
hearts were being broken was the idea that Fate was cruel to decree their
parting, and that, while they acted wisely, they must also suffer for
their wisdom. And therefore:
"_Though Fate forbids such things to be,
Yet by thine eyes and ringlets curled!
I cannot_ lose _a_ world _for thee,
But would not lose_ thee _for a_ World."
And therefore again, just two months later:
"_The spell is broke, the charm is flown!
Thus is it with Life's fitful fever:
We madly smile when we should groan;
Delirium is our best deceiver.
Each lucid interval of thought
Recalls the woes of Nature's charter;
And_ He _that acts as_ wise men ought,
_But_ lives--_as Saints have died--a martyr._"
That is all; and the story which the lines half cover up and half disclose
is clearly of very little consequence. Mrs. Smith had enjoyed her
flirtation, and had had verses written to her--much better verses than had
been addressed to any of the belles of Southwell. Byron had posed, not
knowing for certain whether he posed or not, had undergone a necessary
experience, and had passed through the fire unhurt. The experiences which
were really to matter to him were yet to come--though not immediately; and
he had hardly finished writing verses to Mrs. Spencer Smith when he began
writing verses to the Maid of Athens.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MAID OF ATHENS--MRS. WERRY--MRS. PEDLEY--THE SWIMMING OF THE
HELLESPONT
"_Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!_"
It would be superfluous to quote more of the poem than that; and it would
be absurd to attach importance to the episode which it commemorates.
Byron came to Athens after an expedition, with Hobhouse, into the heart of
Albania. He was, according to Hobhouse's Diary, "all this time engaged in
writing a long poem in the Spenserian stanzas," the poem being, of course,
the first canto of "Childe Harold." That the travellers roughed it a good
deal is evident from Hobhouse's description of a supper whereat "Byron,
with his sabre, cut off the head of a goose which shared our room with a
collection of pigs and cows, and so we got an excellent roast." He was
much pleased with his reception by Ali Pasha, who said "he was certain I
was a man of birth because I had small ears, curling hair, and little
white hands." He was also, at the same time, brooding on his "passion for
a married woman," and no doubt felt himself years older in consequence of
that passion; and then, arriving at Athens, he fell in love, or fancied
or pretended that he was in love, with his landlady's daughter.
That was the social status of the Maid of Athens. Her mother, Theodora
Macri, the widow of a former British Vice-Consul, had been reduced to
letting lodgings--a sitting-room and two bedrooms, looking on to a
courtyard, much patronised by English travellers, and highly recommended
by them. There were three daughters, and there are passages in Byron's
letters which might be read to mean that he was equally in love with all
of them. "An attachment to three Greek girls" is his summary of the
incident to Hodgson; but he distinguished one of them by the special
homage of a poem destined to be one of the most famous in the English
language, with the result that Theresa Macri, Maid of Athens, became an
institution, and that subsequent lodgers made much of her, looking for a
romance where there had, in fact, been little more than the formal salute
of the ships passing in the night. Hugh W. Williams, the artist, who was
at Athens in 1817, depicts them for us:
"On the crown of the head of each is a red Albanian skull-cap, with a
blue tassel spread out and fastened down like a star. Near the edge or
bottom of the skull-cap is a handkerchief of various colours bound
round their temples. The youngest wears her hair loose, falling on her
shoulders."
[Illustration: _The Maid of Athens._]
That, no doubt, was how Theresa wore her hair when Byron flattered her
with his attentions. She also, it seems, wore "white stockings and
yellow slippers," and had "teeth of pearly whiteness" and "manners such as
would be fascinating in any country." It was the usual thing, according to
Williams, for their mother's lodgers to flirt with one or other of them.
It would have been "remarkable," he thinks, if they had not done so.
Presumably he did so himself. At all events he admired them very much as
they sat "in the Eastern style, a little reclined, with their limbs
gathered under them on the divan, and without shoes"; but he insists with
no less emphasis upon their propriety than upon their graces. "Modesty and
delicacy of conduct," he comments, "will always command respect"; and
further:
"Though so poor, their virtues shine as conspicuous as their
beauty.... Not all the wealth of the East, or the complimentary lays
even of the first of England's poets could render them so truly worthy
of love and admiration."
Moore tells us that Byron, in Oriental style, gashed himself across the
breast with a dagger as a symbolic demonstration of his conquest by
Theresa's charms, and that Theresa "looked on very coolly during the
operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no degree
moved to gratitude." And that, of course, is what one would expect. The
game was being played according to the rules, and Theresa was child enough
to enjoy the fun. One can imagine that it was a game which the girls
often played with the lodgers, teaching them the rules when they did not
already know them. One would be churlish indeed to begrudge them their
enjoyment, or to protest that they were "forward" or suspect that they
were "designing." The landlady's daughter can often do much to make life
in a lodging-house agreeable; and youth must have its hour though time
flies and love, like a bird, is on the wing.
Our next glimpse of Theresa, taken from Walsh's "Narrative of a Residence
in Constantinople," shows us that time is, indeed, an "ever-rolling
stream," carrying its daughters, as well as its sons away upon the flood.
"Lord Byron's poem," writes Walsh in 1817, "has rendered the poor lady no
temporal service though it has ensured her immortality"; and he continues:
"She was once very lovely, I was informed by those who knew her, and
realised all the descriptive part of the poem; but time and, I
suppose, disappointed hopes preyed upon her, and though still very
elegant in her person, and gentle and lady-like in her manners, she
has lost all pretensions to beauty, and has a countenance singularly
marked by hopeless sadness."
That, no doubt, is the exaggeration of a sentimentalist. Theresa's hopes
can hardly have been serious. Landladies' daughters, have too many hopes
deferred and disappointed to allow the disappointment of any hope in
particular to blight their lives. Theresa, in due course, became Mrs.
Black, the wife, like her mother, of a vice-consul; and she lived to the
great age of eighty, "a tall old lady," writes the United States Consular
Agent at Athens, "with features inspiring reverence, and showing that at a
time past she was a beautiful woman." Her countrymen, however, did not
forget that she had been the Maid of Athens; and, Byron's services to the
Greek cause being also remembered, a public subscription provided for the
necessities of her last years. That is all that there is to say about her
unless it be to repeat that she played but a very minor part in the
pageant of Byron's life, and cannot even be spoken of as Mrs. Spencer
Smith's only rival.
For there were others; and though the other stories are clouded with a
good deal of doubt, they cannot fail to leave a certain collective
impression of Byron as a man whom all women found attractive and many
women found susceptible.
At Smyrna, for instance, there was a Mrs. Werry, whose name and effusive
proceedings are mentioned by Hobhouse:
"Mrs. Werry actually cut off a lock of Byron's hair on parting from
him to-day, and shed a good many tears. Pretty well for fifty-six
years at least!"
At Athens, too, there was a second affair of which there is a full and
circumstantial account in Medwin's "Conversations of Lord Byron." The
heroine was a Turkish girl of whom Byron was "fond as I have been of few
women." All went well, he told Medwin, until the Fast of Ramadan, when Law
and Religion prohibit love-making for forty days, and the women are not
allowed to quit their apartments. An attempt to arrange an assignation at
this season was detected. The penalty was to be death, and Byron was to be
kept in ignorance of everything until it was too late to interfere:
"A mere accident only enabled me to prevent the completion of the
sentence. I was taking one of my usual evening rides by the sea-side,
when I observed a crowd of people moving down to the shore, and the
arms of the soldiers glittering among them. They were not so far off
but that I thought I could now and then distinguish a faint and
stifled shriek. My curiosity was forcibly excited, and I despatched
one of my followers to inquire the cause of the procession. What was
my horror to learn that they were carrying an unfortunate girl, sewn
up in a sack, to be thrown into the sea! I did not hesitate as to what
was to be done. I knew I could depend on my faithful Albanians, and
rode up to the officer commanding the party, threatening in case of
his refusal to give up his prisoner, that I would adopt means to
compel him. He did not like the business he was on, or perhaps the
determined look of my bodyguard, and consented to accompany me back to
the city with the girl, whom I discovered to be my Turkish favourite.
Suffice it to say that my interference with the chief magistrate,
backed by a heavy bribe, saved her; but it was only on condition that
I should break off all intercourse with her, and that she should
immediately quit Athens, and be sent to her friends in Thebes. There
she died, a few days after her arrival, of a fever, perhaps of love."
"Perhaps of love" is the typical finishing touch of the "fatal man;" but
Medwin may have added it. To Byron, at any rate, the incident counted for
no more than any of the other incidents; but it was followed, or is said
to have been followed, by an incident which counted for even less--the
incident of the beautiful Mrs. Pedley, related in a curious anonymous work
entitled: "The life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of the Right Hon. G. G.
Noel Byron," published in 1825.
Byron met Mrs. Pedley at Malta on his way home. She was the wife of a Dr.
Pedley, beautiful and frivolous--addicted, it may be, to levity, as a
relief from the dulness of garrison life. Her husband, for reasons which
we are left to conjecture, turned her out of his house. She came to
Byron's house, sat down on the door-step, and refused to go. Perhaps she
argued that, as Byron had loved one married woman, he was prepared to love
all married women; but if so, she argued wrongly. Byron begged her to
return to her home, and when she declined to do so, he sent a note to Dr.
Pedley to ask what he had better do with her. The Dr.'s answer was to pack
up the lady's clothes and other belongings and send them to Byron's
rooms, with a message to the effect that he wished him joy of the
adventure. The upshot of it all was that Byron consented to take Mrs.
Pedley to England, but gave her very little of his society, and parted
with her immediately on landing.
Such, at all events, is the story as the anonymous biographer relates it,
though it is impossible to say on what authority it reposes. Even if it
rests upon gossip, and is untrue, it helps to fill in the picture by
reflecting the reputation which Byron was making for himself during his
Oriental travels: a reputation, on the one hand, of a man who made love
with cynical recklessness, and on the other hand of a man who swaggered
round the Levant with unwarrantable arrogance and pride.
We have already seen him swaggering about his swimming of the Hellespont.
He continued to swagger about it to the very end of his life. Even in "Don
Juan" there is a well-known reference to the exploit:
"_A better swimmer you could scarce see ever;
He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did._"
It was a considerable feat, no doubt, though he was only an hour and ten
minutes in the water; but the anonymous biographer already quoted adds
some details which make it, if not more glorious, at least more dramatic.
Byron, according to this version of the story, was helped out of the
water in a state of extreme exhaustion, and lay three days in a
fisherman's hut, nursed and tended by the fisherman's wife. The fisherman
did not in the least know whom he was entertaining, but believed his
guest, whose language he could not speak, to be a needy shipwrecked
sailor. On his departure, therefore, he pressed on him not only bread and
cheese and wine, but also a few copper coins. Byron accepted the gift,
without attempting to explain, and a few days afterwards sent his servant
with a return gift: a brace of pistols, a fowling piece, a fishing net,
and some silk to make a gown for the fisherman's wife. The fisherman was
so overwhelmed that he set out at once in his boat to thank the generous
donor, and was caught in a sudden squall and drowned.
That is a story of which it is impossible to say whether it is true or
only well invented. We are on safer ground in taking the testimony of the
well-known people who met Byron in the course of his journey; and our
principal witnesses are Lady Hester Stanhope, who passed him at Athens on
her way to Lebanon, Sir Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe, the "great Eltchi," then Secretary of Embassy at
Constantinople, and John Galt, who was still going his rounds as a
high-class commercial traveller. No one of the three is extravagantly
eulogistic, and all three bear witness to the pose, the swagger, and the
arrogance.
"A sort of Don Quixote fighting with the police for a woman of the town,"
is Lady Hester's verdict, suggested, no doubt, by the adventure on which
Byron put such a different colour when he related it to Medwin. "He
wanted," she continues, "to make himself something great," but she will
not allow that he succeeded. "He had a great deal of vice in his looks,"
she says, "his eyes set close together and a contracted brow"; and, as for
his poetry, Lady Hester shakes her head even over that:
"At Athens, I saw nothing in him but a well-bred man, like many
others; for, as for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as
for the thoughts, who knows where he got them? Many a one picks up
some old book that nobody knows anything about, and gets his ideas out
of it."
That reflection, perhaps, always supposing that Dr. Merryon has reported
it correctly, throws a brighter flood of light upon the critic's mind than
upon the poet's genius; but the criticism offered by Sir Stratford Canning
was a criticism of matters which he understood. He "cannot," he says,
"forbear to record" what happened when Byron obtained permission to be
present at an audience granted by the Sultan to the _corps diplomatique_.
There is a reference to the story in Moore's "Journal"; but the authorised
version must be sought in Lord Stratford de Redcliffe's Papers:
"We had assembled," he writes, "in the hall of our so-called palace
when Lord Byron arrived in scarlet regimentals topped by a profusely
feathered cocked hat, and, coming up to me, asked what his place as a
peer of the realm was to be in the procession. I referred him to Mr.
Adair, who had not yet left his room, and the upshot of their private
interview was that, as the Turks ignored all but officials, any
amateur, though a peer, must be content to follow in the wake of the
Embassy. His lordship thereupon walked away with that look of scornful
indignation which so well became his fine, imperious features."
"As Canning refused to walk behind him, Byron went home," is Hobhouse's
laconic report of the incident; but when a letter from the Ambassador
followed him, he apologised. His fancy dress, it had seemed to him, was
quite as becoming as other people's uniforms; he had honestly supposed
himself to be standing out for the legitimate rights of a peer of the
realm. As this was not so--as the Austrian Internuncio had been consulted
and had said that it was not so--then he would be glad to join the
procession as a simple individual, and humbly to follow his Excellency and
"his ox or his ass or anything that was his." Whether that was a subtle
way of calling Stratford Canning an ass does not appear; but the
transaction was a characteristic exhibition of the neck-or-nothing
audacity of Byron's undisciplined youth. He figures, at this date, as a
Lord among adventurers and an adventurer among Lords.
Stratford Canning saw him in the latter and John Galt in the former light.
At a dinner-party at which they were both present, "he seemed inclined,"
says Galt, "to exact a deference to his dogmas that was more lordly than
philosophical"; and he continues:
"It was too evident ... that without intending wrong, or any offence,
the unchecked humour of his temper was, by its caprices, calculated to
prevent him from ever gaining that regard to which his talents and
freer moods, independently of his rank, ought to have entitled him.
Such men become objects of solicitude, but never of esteem."
The fair inference seems to be that Byron had let Galt perceive the great
gulf fixed between peers of the realm and commercial travellers. It was
the sort of thing that he would do when in a bad temper, though not when
in a good one. Galt, however, not only submitted to the snub, but
accounted for it like a philosopher. Byron, he says, was in trouble at
this time, not about his soul, but about his remittances; and "the false
dignity he assumed" was really "the apprehension of a person of his rank
being exposed to require assistance among strangers." One can certainly
find support for the supposition in his urgent letters home.
In due course, however, the remittances turned up, and Byron recovered his
affability and resumed his journey. Hobhouse left him and returned alone.
"Took leave," he notes in his Diary, "_non sine lacrymis_, of this
singular young person, on a little stone terrace at the end of the bay,
dividing with him a little nosegay of flowers." There had been some
coolness between them, and this was the sentimental renewal of their
friendship. A return visit to Athens was the next stage, but there does
not appear to have been any resumption of the old relations with the Maid
of Athens. On the contrary, it was on this second visit to Athens that
Lady Hester Stanhope discovered the poet "fighting the police for a woman
of the town."
At Athens, too, Byron met his old Cambridge acquaintance, Lord Sligo, from
whom we obtain, through Moore, some further glimpses at his manner of life
and characteristic affectations. He was once more, it seems, constrained
to combat the flesh by means of self-denying ordinances, and, to that end,
took three Turkish baths a week, and confined himself to a diet of rice
and vinegar and water. This system, and a fever contracted at Patras, made
him very pale; and he felt that to be pale was to be interesting.
"Standing one day before a looking glass," Moore tells us, "he said to
Lord Sligo:
"'How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption!'
"'Why of a consumption?' asked his friend.
"'Because then,' he answered, 'all the women would say, "See that poor
Byron--how interesting he looks in dying!"'"
But that is another of the stories which throw at least as much light on
the reporter as on the reported. Lord Sligo, no doubt, was the sort of
healthy, wooden-headed young Philistine on whom it is a joy to test the
effect of such remarks. Byron, in thus posing for him, was, so to say,
"trying it on the dog." There is no such foolishness in his correspondence
with those whom he regarded as his intellectual equals, and one cannot
conclude the account of his travels better than by quoting his summary of
their moral effect contained in a letter to Hodgson:
"I hope you will find me an altered personage--I do not mean in body
but in manner, for I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do
in this damned world. I am tolerably sick of vice, which I have tried
in its agreeable varieties, and mean, on my return, to cut all my
dissolute acquaintance, leave off wine and carnal company, and betake
myself to politics and decorum."
To what extent, and within what limits, he carried out these good
resolutions, we shall observe as we proceed.
CHAPTER IX
RETURN TO ENGLAND--PUBLICATION OF "CHILDE HAROLD"
July 1811 saw Byron back in England after two years' absence, but in no
hurry, for various reasons, to return to Newstead. The "venerable pile"
had been desecrated by the invasion of bailiffs in connection with an
unpaid upholsterer's bill; and Mrs. Byron was living there, and was, as
usual, quarrelling with her neighbours. Byron, in one of his letters from
the Levant, tells her that she cannot deny that she is a "vixen," and
suggests that she is in the habit of drinking more champagne than is good
for her. It was only to be expected that she would rattle the fire-irons,
and throw the tongs, as furiously as ever--even if a little less
accurately--under the stimulating influence. He lingered, therefore, at
Reddish's Hotel, Saint James's Street; and it was there that the news of
her sudden illness--the result, it is said, of shock caused by the
magnitude of the afore-mentioned upholsterer's bill--surprised him. He
hurried to her, but the news of her death met him on his way.
He had not loved her. We have passed many proofs of that, and many others
could be given. She had taunted him with his deformity, and he
believed--so he told Lord Sligo--that he owed it to her "false delicacy"
at his birth. She had not understood him, and he had fled before her
violence. Unable to love her, he had missed a precious emotion to which he
felt himself entitled--that may be one of the secrets of his persistent
view of himself as a lonely man, without a friend in a lonely world. If he
was shaken by the sudden sundering of the tie, it would have been too much
to expect him to be prostrated by his grief, or to do more than pay his
brief tribute to the solemnity of death, remembering that there had been
signs of tenderness in the midst of, or in the intervals between, the
storms of passion.
"Oh, Mrs. By," he exclaimed to his mother's maid. "I had but one friend in
the world, and she is gone"; but he always said that of every friend who
died--of Skinner Matthews who was drowned in the Cam; of John Wingfield
who was drowned off Coimbra; and of Eddleston, the choir boy, whom he had
admitted to his intimacy at Cambridge. He said it quite sincerely, giving
emotion its hour, and then let his thoughts flow in other directions. On
the day of Mrs. Byron's funeral he told his servant to fetch the gloves
and spar with him; and the boy thought that he hit harder than usual. Then
he threw down the gloves and left the room without a word, with the air of
a man disgusted with himself for trying to kill devils like that; and
presently he was in the thick of his preparations for the production of
"Childe Harold."
He had brought the manuscript of "Childe Harold" home with him, together
with the manuscript of "Hints from Horace." He believed "Hints from
Horace" to be much the greater work of the two; and his reasons for
thinking so are easy to understand. "Hints from Horace" was a satire based
on the best models, and composed on conventional lines. It could be
compared with the models, and judged and "marked," like a schoolboy's
theme. "Childe Harold" was an experiment. It expressed a personality--the
personality of a very young man who was not yet quite sure of himself and,
except when his temper was up, was afraid of being laughed at.
Hobhouse--that candid, trusty, matter-of-fact friend--had seen it, and had
criticised it pretty much in the spirit in which Mark Twain's jumping frog
was criticised. He had failed to see any points in that poem different
from any other poem. Byron, consequently, was sensitive and timorous about
it. "Childe Harold," he felt, like "Hours of Idleness," would put him on
his defence, whereas in "Hints from Horace," as in "English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers," he would have the advantage of attacking. He needed the
encouragement of flattery.
One Dallas, a distant relative who now introduced himself and, for a
season, doubled the parts, as it were, of literary mentor and literary
valet, supplied the flattery, recognising that, whereas "Hints from
Horace" was just a satire like another, "Childe Harold" was the expression
of a new sentiment, hitherto unheard in English literature. "Hints from
Horace," he thought, might be published, if the author wished it--it did
not much matter one way or the other; but "Childe Harold" must be
published. It was interesting; it was romantic; it would please. It was
not merely a narrative, but a manifesto. It ignored conventions, lifted a
mask, and revealed a man--a new and unsuspected type of man--beneath it.
So Dallas spoke and wrote; and Byron let himself be persuaded. He yielded,
at first, with reluctance--or perhaps it was only with a pretence of
reluctance; but, after he had yielded, he entered into the spirit of the
situation. He would not only publish, but he would publish with _éclat_.
If he could not command success, he would deserve it, and would be careful
not to throw away a chance. He would not be contented with a publisher who
merely printed a few copies of the poem, pushed them outside the
back-door, and waited to see what would happen. The minds of men--and
women--should be duly prepared for the sensation in store for them.
Whatever the mountain might be destined to bring forth, at least it should
be visibly in labour. Publication should be preluded by a noise as of the
rolling of logs.
The money did not matter. The "magnificent man"--and there was a good deal
of Aristotle's "magnificent man" about Byron at this period--could not
soil his hands by taking money for a poem even for the purpose of
discharging his debt to the upholsterers whose bills were frightening
his mother out of her life. Perish the mean thought! If there was money in
the poem, Dallas might have it for himself. All that the author wanted was
glory--a "boom," as we vulgar moderns say--and that arresting noise
already referred to, as of the rolling of logs. Dallas must see to that to
the best of his ability, and he himself would lend a hand. Above all,
there must be no hole-and-corner publishing. Cawthorne must on no account
have the book--his status was not good enough. Miller was the man, and,
failing Miller, Murray. On the whole it was to Murray that it would be
best to go. Murray was the coming man--one could divine him as the
publisher of the future, and he had, on his side divined Byron as the poet
of the future, and expressed a wish to "handle" some of his work.
So Dallas went to Murray, and got five hundred guineas for the copyright;
and then the sound of the rolling of the logs began. Galt heard it. Galt,
being himself a man of letters as well as a commercial traveller, knew
what it was that he heard. Galt, who was now back in London, tells us that
"various surmises to stimulate curiosity were circulated," and he
continues:
"I do not say that these were by his orders or under his directions,
but on one occasion I did fancy that I could discern a touch of his
own hand in a paragraph in the _Morning Post_, in which he was
mentioned as having returned from an excursion into the interior of
Africa; and when I alluded to it, my suspicion was confirmed by his
embarrassment."
That is quite modern--one often reads similar paragraphs nowadays
concerning the visits of novelists to the Engadine, or to Khartoum; and if
Byron did not go quite so far as to speak publicly of his forthcoming work
as "a colossal undertaking," he managed, without saying so, to convey the
impression that that was what it was. He also contrived to have the proofs
shown, as a great privilege, to the right people, and was careful to let
the critics have advance copies with a view to notice on the day of
publication. Dallas himself reviewed it before the day of publication, and
was excused on the ground that his indiscretion had proved "a good
advertisement." The privileged women--Lady Caroline Lamb was among
them--enchanted by the sentiment of the poem, boasted to the women who
were not so privileged, and besought an introduction to the poet. "I must
see him. I am dying to see him," was Lady Caroline's exclamation to
Rogers. "He bites his nails," Rogers maliciously warned her; but she
persisted as vehemently as ever.
She was to see him presently, in circumstances and with consequences which
we shall have to note. In the meantime many striking stories concerning
him were floating about for her to hear. She heard, for instance--or one
may suppose her to have heard--of that dinner-party at Rogers' house at
which Byron distinguished himself by his abstemiousness, refused soup, and
fish, and mutton, and wine, asked for hard biscuits and soda-water, and,
when Rogers confessed himself unable to provide these delicacies, "dined
upon potatoes bruised down upon his plate and drenched with vinegar." Let
us hope that she never heard the end of the story which proceeds, in
"Table Talk of Samuel Rogers": "I did not then know, what I now know to be
a fact, that Byron, after leaving my house, had gone to a Club in Saint
James's Street and eaten a hearty meat-supper." And, of course, her
interest, like the interest of the rest of the world, was stimulated by
Byron's maiden speech in the House of Lords.
Galt says quite bluntly that "there was a degree of worldly management in
making his first appearance in the House of Lords so immediately preceding
the publication of his poem." Most probably there was. When so many logs
were rolling, this particular log was hardly likely to be left unrolled;
and there is no denying that the note of self-advertisement does sound in
the speech quite as loudly as the note of sympathy with the common
people--those Nottingham rioters and frame-breakers for whose suppression
it was proposed to legislate.
Viewed as a contribution to the debate, the speech does more credit to the
speaker's heart than to his head. The appeal for pity for misguided,
labouring men is mixed up with a denunciation of labour-saving appliances
as devices for the further impoverishment of the poor. An economist might
say a good deal about that if this were the place for saying it. Byron,
such a one would point out, was a Radical by instinct, but a Radical who
had as yet but an imperfect comprehension of the natural laws most
favourable to the production, distribution, and exchange of wealth. But
let that pass. The most resounding note of the speech is, after all, the
note of the new man presenting himself, and explaining who he is, and what
he has done:
"I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsular, I have been in
some of the most oppressed provinces in Turkey; but never under the
most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid
wretchedness," &c. &c. &c.
That, in the days in which travel was really travel, involving adventure
and bestowing unique experience, was the sort of utterance to draw
attention. Byron had actually been to the places which other people only
talked and read about; and he was no bronzed, maimed, or wrinkled veteran,
but a youth with curling hair, a marble brow, a pallid face, a godlike
aspect. What havoc must he not have wrought in harems, and in the hearts
of odalisques! He was so young, so handsome, so clever--and, according to
his own account, so wicked. And he had written a poem, it appeared--a poem
as wicked and beautiful as himself, explaining, with all kinds of
delightful details, the shocking courses into which he had been driven by
disappointed love. However much poetry one left unread, one must read that
poem, and read it at once, in order to show that one was "in the
movement."
So the women argued. It did not matter to them that Byron lacked the
graces of the natural orator, and declaimed his sentiments in a monotonous
sing-song tone, like a public schoolboy on a speech-day. It mattered still
less to them whether his economics were sound or shaky. Sympathy, not
argument, was what they wanted, and the sympathy was there. Byron would be
some one to lionise--some one, it might be, to love--some one, at any
rate, whom every woman must try to understand. And the first step towards
understanding him must be to read his book.
They read it, and made the men read it too. It was recognised, as such
things come to be recognised, that any one who had not read it would be
liable to feel foolish wherever the "best" people were gathered together.
The first edition, issued on March 10, 1812, was sold out in three days.
There was a second edition in April, a third in June, a fourth in
September, a fifth in December, a sixth in August 1813, a seventh in
February 1814. By 1819, an eleventh edition had been reached; and the
subsequent editions would require a professional statistician to count
them. Byron, in short, had not only, as he said, "woke up one morning and
found himself famous"; his fame had proved to have enduring qualities.
The suddenness of the fame, as we have seen, was not solely the result
either of accident or of merit. Author, publisher, and literary agent--for
Dallas may fairly be ranked with the pioneers of the last-named
profession--had planned and plotted for it. It may even be questioned
whether such supreme success was quite deserved; and it would be easy to
cite examples of much greater work--some of Wordsworth's, for
example--which was far less successful. But that the enthusiasm was
natural--and indeed almost inevitable--cannot be disputed.
The title helped, as Byron himself recognised with cheerful cynicism.
Lords, of course, had tried their hands at poetry before, but never with
much success, whether they were good lords or wicked. Their compositions
had amounted to little more than ingenious exercises in rhyme. Either they
had failed to put their personalities into their poems or they had had no
personalities worth speaking of to put into them. One could say that, with
varying degrees of truth, of Rochester, Roscommon, Sheffield, and
Carlisle. To find a lord whose poems could be taken seriously one had to
go back to the Elizabethan ages; and modern readers--especially the women
among them--were not very fond of going back so far. To get real poetry,
with a real personality behind it, from a lord was "phenomenal," like
getting figs from thistles--a thing to stand still and take note of.
Note, therefore, was taken--the more carefully, perhaps, because Byron
was, as it were, an unknown lord, born and brought up in exile, coming
into society with something of the air of one who had to break down
barriers in order to claim his birthright. His poem was, in a manner, his
weapon of assault; and, whatever else might be said about it, it was, in
no case mere exercise in metrical composition. It was the manifesto of a
new personality.
An immature personality, no doubt--in these two cantos of "Childe Harold"
the essential Byron is not yet revealed. A personality, too, it might be,
with a good deal of paste board theatricality about it--sincerity and
clarity of insight were later Byronic developments. But that did not
matter--least of all did it matter to the women. Melodrama is often more
instantaneously effective than drama; and "twopence coloured" has obvious
immediate advantages over "penny plain." The pose might be apparent, but
it was not ridiculous--or, at all events, it did not strike people as
being so; and the power of posing without making himself ridiculous is one
of the tests of a man's value. Moreover no pose which makes an impression
is ever entirely insincere. The great posturer must put a good deal of
himself into his postures, just as the great painter puts a good deal of
himself into his pictures. Matter-of-fact persons like Hobhouse might not
think so; but women, with their surer instinct, know better. Hobhouse,
glancing at the manuscript of "Childe Harold," might say, with perfect
candour, that he saw no points in that poem different from any other poem;
but to the women it was, and was bound to be, a revelation.
A revelation, too, of just such a personality as the women liked to think
that they understood--and with just such gaps in the revelation as they
liked to be puzzled by! One may almost say that the hearts of Englishwomen
went out with a rush to Byron for the same reason for which the
hearts of the Frenchwomen, two generations earlier, had gone out to
Rousseau--because he gave them sentiment in place of gallantry. He had, in
fact, given them both; but the note of sentiment predominated; and it was
easy to believe that the sentiment was sincere, and the gallantry merely
the consoling pastime of the stricken heart.
The women took that view, as they were bound to, agreeing that Byron was
the most interesting man of their age and generation. He certainly was
infinitely more interesting, from their point of view, than Rousseau. He
was younger, better born, and better looking, with more distinguished
manners--one of themselves and not, like Jean-Jacques, a promoted lackey.
So, in a day and a night, they made him famous, and ensured that, whatever
else his career might be, it should be spectacular. The world, in short,
was placed, in a sudden instant, at his feet. It was open to him to stand
with his foot on its neck, striking attitudes--to step at a stride into a
notable position in public life, or to ride, in his own way, with his own
haste, to the devil.
Or, at all events, it seemed open to him to make this choice, though the
actual course of his life in the presence of the apparent choice, might
well be cited as an object lesson in the distinction which the
philosophers have drawn between the freedom to do as we will, and the
freedom to will as we will. Which is to say that the spectacular life, in
his case as in so many others, was to be at the mercy of the inner life,
and the things seen in it were largely to be the effect of causes which
were out of sight.
It is to that inner life, and to those invisible causes of visible effects
that we must now turn back.
CHAPTER X
THE SECRET ORCHARD
The invisible force which was beginning to influence Byron's life, and was
presently to deflect it, was a revival of his recollections of Mary
Chaworth. He nowhere tells us so, nor do his biographers on his behalf,
but the fact is none the less quite certain. The proofs abound, though the
name is never mentioned in them; and Mr. Richard Edgecumbe has marshalled
them[6] with conclusive force. The course which Byron's life followed--the
things which he willed and did, as well as the things he said--can only be
explained if Mary Chaworth is once more brought into the story.
She is, it must be admitted, one of the most shadowy and elusive of all
heroines of romance. We have hardly a scrap of her handwriting--hardly a
definite report about her from any contemporary witness. She is said to
have been disposed to flirt before her marriage, but to have been serious
and well-conducted afterwards. It is known that her husband was unkind to
her and that she was unhappy with him; there are statements that she was
"religious"; but most of the other evidence is negative, leaving the
impression that she was commonplace. The secret of her charm, that is to
say, is lost; and we can only guess at it--each of us guessing differently
because something of ourselves has to go to the framing of the guesses.
Assuredly there is no inference unfavourable to her charm to be drawn from
the fact that she passed through the world without cutting a figure in it.
The women who dazzle the world are rarely the women for whose love men
count the world well lost. It has been written that a man could no more
fall in love with Mrs. Siddons than with the Pyramid of Cheops. Men have
also refrained, as a rule, from falling in love with the brilliant women
of the _salons_--with Madame du Deffand, for instance, and Madame Necker,
and Lady Blessington, and Lady Holland. The qualities of a hostess, they
have felt, are different from those of a mistress. Such women can dominate
the crowd, wearing their tiaras like queens, in the garish light of
fashionable assemblies; but, in the twilight of the secret orchard, their
empire crumbles to the dust. It is not given to them to make any man feel
that the limitations of time and space have ceased and that the whole of
life is concentrated in the life lived here and now. The women who possess
that power are the women who seem insignificant to the men to whom they
have not revealed themselves.
Mary Chaworth possessed that power, and so left no mark anywhere in life
except on Byron's heart. She was quite undistinguished, and seemingly
conventional--the last woman in the world to be likely to throw her bonnet
over the windmill; but she had this subtle, indefinable, and inexplicable
secret. She had had it even in the irresponsible days when she flirted
with the fat boy, but failed to divine his genius, and preferred the
hard-riding and hard-drinking squire. She retained it when the fox-hunting
squire had shown the coarseness of his fibre, and the fat boy was a man
whose genius had proved itself. Every meeting, therefore, was bound to
bring a renewal of the spell, even though, in the intervals between the
meetings, Byron could forget.
We have it, on Byron's authority, that there were certain "stolen
meetings." It has been assumed that these were prior to Mary Chaworth's
marriage; but that is hardly credible. There was no need for stolen
meetings then; for everything was frank and open. They must have taken
place, if at all--and there is no reason to doubt that they did take
place--subsequently to the marriage: subsequently to that dinner-party at
which Byron and Mary met, and were embarrassed, and did not know what to
say to each other. Perhaps, since Mary was a woman whose instinct it was
to walk in the straight path, there was no conscious and deliberate
secrecy. The more likely assumption, indeed, is that they contrived to
meet by accident, and then thought it better, without any definite
exchange of promises, not to mention that they had met. However that may
be, the spell continued, and Mary kept the key of the secret orchard. Her
spirit was certain to revisit it, even if she herself did not.
Then came the long Eastern pilgrimage. The feeling that this sort of thing
could not go on indefinitely may very well have been one of the motives
for it; and Byron, of course, was quite young enough to forget, and a
great deal too young to let past memories divert his mind from present
pleasures. He did forget--or very nearly so; he did divert himself as
opportunity occurred. He enjoyed his battle with the police for a woman of
the town; he enjoyed his passion for a married woman. There is no reason
whatever to suppose that he was really thinking of Mary Chaworth when he
wrote verses to the Maid of Athens, or when he gave the most precious of
his rings to Mrs. Spencer Smith. But the secret orchard always remained;
the spirit of the old tenant might at any time return to it. Such spirits
always do return whenever life suddenly, for whatever reason, seems a
blank.
It was, in this instance, death--a rapid series of deaths--that brought it
back. Byron's mother died, in circumstances for which, as we have seen, he
had some reason to reproach himself. His choirboy friend Eddleston pined
away from consumption. Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned in the
Cam--entangled in the river weeds and sucked under. Wingfield was drowned
on his way to the war in Spain. The news of these four deaths came almost
simultaneously, and the shock broke down Byron's high spirits. His
letters are very heartbroken and eloquent.
"Some curse," he wrote to Scrope Davies, the gamester, "hangs over me and
mine.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate--left almost alone in
the world." "At three-and-twenty," he wrote to Dallas, "I am left alone,
and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin
again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life?" To
Dallas, too, he wrote a certain morbid letter about the four skulls which
lay on his study table, and in another letter to Hodgson he says:
"The blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from
the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at
times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every
morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the
subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I
am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before."
The consolations which Hodgson offered him in his distress were those of
religion. He wrote him long letters concerning the immortality of the
soul; letters which caused Byron, years afterwards, to remark, when his
friend had taken orders, that Hodgson was always pious, "even when he was
kept by a washerwoman"--and was shocked by his blasphemous reply that he
did not believe in immortality and did not desire it. He appealed to
Byron--"for God's sake"--to pull himself together and read Paley's
"Evidences of Christianity." He had a great respect for Paley as a Senior
Wrangler and entertained no doubt that his conclusions followed from his
premisses. A little later, he and Harness,[7] one of Byron's Harrow
protégés, who was then at Cambridge, reading for his degree, went down to
Newstead to stay with Byron.
There were no orgies there this time. No "Paphian girls" were introduced;
no practical jokes were played; the cook and the housemaid remained in the
servants' quarters. "Nothing," says Harness, "could have been more orderly
than the course of our days"--which was right and proper seeing that both
he and Hodgson were shortly going to be ordained. If the trio sat up late,
it was only to talk about literature and religion. Hodgson pressed
orthodox views on Byron with "judicious zeal and affectionate
earnestness." Harness supported him with the diffidence appropriate to his
tender years. Byron maintained his own point of view, while thinking of
other things.
Chiefly he thought of the ghost which now revisited his secret orchard,
telling himself that it was not the ghost but the real woman which should
have been there. With Mary Chaworth alone he had known the sensation that
nothing else mattered while he and she were together. Now that so many
deaths had made a solitude in his heart he sorely needed the renewal of
that feeling. She could have vouchsafed it to him; she both could and
should. Why then, was she not at Annesley, waiting for him, granting more
stolen interviews, proving that she still cared, affording him that escape
from life to ecstasy?
That was the drift of Byron's thoughts at the time when Hodgson was trying
to direct his attention to Paley's "Evidences." He saw, as youth is apt to
do, more possibilities of comfort in love than in theology--a fact which
is the less to be wondered at seeing that the theology in which he had
been brought up was of the uncomfortable Calvinistic kind; and though he
was the victim of a mood rather than of a passion--for passion needed the
stimulus of sight and touch--the mood had to be expressed, and perhaps
worked off, in verse. It burst into "Childe Harold":
"_Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!
Whom Youth and Youth's affections bound to me;
Who did for me what none beside have done,
Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.
What is my Being! thou has ceased to be!
Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,
Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall see--
Would they had never been, or were to come!
Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam._
"_Oh, ever loving, lovely, and beloved!
How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past.
And clings to thoughts now better far removed!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.
All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death, thou hast;
The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend,
Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,
And grief with grief continuing still to blend,
Hath snatched the little joy that Life hath yet to lend._"
These stanzas, with three others, were sent to Dallas after "Childe
Harold" was in the press, together with a letter which must have mystified
him though, as a "poor relation," he would not well ask impertinent
questions; a letter to the effect that Byron has "supped full of horrors"
and "become callous" and "has not a tear left." The "Thyrza" sequence of
poems belongs to the same period--almost to the same day. They have
puzzled many generations of editors and commentators because "Thyrza" is
addressed in them as one who is dead, and because, though Byron spoke of
Thyrza to his friends as a real person and showed a lock of her hair, no
trace of any woman answering to her description can be discovered in any
chronicle of his life.
The explanation is that Thyrza was not really dead, though Byron chose so
to write of her. Thyrza was Mary Chaworth who was dead to Byron in the
sense that she had passed out of his life, as he had every reason to think
(though he thought wrongly) for ever. The poems expressed, according to
Moore, "the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs,"
with which was mingled the memory of her who "though living was for him as
much lost as" any of the dead friends for whom he mourned. They expressed,
in fact, his despair at finding the secret orchard tenanted only by a
ghost; and if we read the poems by the light of that clue, we can get a
clear meaning out of every line.
They are too long to be quoted. Readers must refer to them and judge. The
note is the note of bitter despair, working up, at the end, into the note
of recklessness. The contrast is there--that contrast as old as the
world--between the things that are and the things that might, and should,
have been; and then there follows the declaration that, as things are what
they are, and as their consequences will be what they will be, there is
nothing for it but to plunge into pleasure, albeit with the full knowledge
that pleasure cannot please:
"_One struggle more, and I am free
From pangs that rend my heart in twain;
One last long sigh to Love and thee,
Then back to busy life again.
It suits me well to mingle now
With things that never pleased before:
Though every joy is fled below,
What future grief can touch me more?_
"_Then bring me wine, the banquet bring;
Man was not formed to live alone:
I'll be that light unmeaning thing
That smiles with all, and weeps with none.
It was not thus in days more dear,
It never would have been, but thou
Hast fled, and left me lonely here;
Thou'rt nothing,--all are nothing now._"
The so-called Byronic pose challenges us in that passage; but it is by no
means as a pose that it must be dismissed. The men who seem to pose are
very often just the men who have the courage--or the bravado, if any one
prefers the word--to be sincere; and Byron, if he is to be rightly
understood, must be thought of as the most sincere man who ever struck an
attitude. That was the secret of his strength. Pose was for him just what
Aristotle, as interpreted by Professor Bywater, says that the spectacle of
tragedy is to the mass of the spectators. It purged him, for the time
being, of his emotions by indulging them. The pose, having done its work,
ceased until the emotions recurred, and then he posed again. Hence the
many differences of opinion among his friends as to whether he posed or
not.
Just now he was posing, in all sincerity, not only to himself but to
Hodgson. At one time he told Hodgson that, as soon as he had set his
affairs in order, he should "leave England for ever." At another he sent
him an "Epistle to a Friend in Answer to some Lines exhorting the Author
to be cheerful and to 'banish Care.'" Hodgson sent them to Moore for
publication in his Life, requesting that the concluding lines should not
be printed; but Moore disregarded the request. The Epistle ended thus:
"_But let this pass--I'll whine no more.
Nor seek again an Eastern shore;
The world befits a busy brain,--
I'll hie me to its haunts again.
But if, in some succeeding year,
When Britain's "May is in the sere,"
Thou hear'st of one, whose deepening crimes
Suit with the sablest of the times,
Of one, whom love nor pity sways,
Nor hope of fame, nor good men's praise;
One, who in stern Ambition's pride,
Perchance not blood shall turn aside:
One ranked in some recording page
With the worst anarchs of the age,
Him wilt thou_ know,--_and_ knowing _pause,
Nor with the effect forget the cause._"
The allusion here, as Hodgson's biographer discerns, is to "his early
disappointment in love as the source of all his subsequent sorrow."
Hodgson's own comment, scrawled in the margin of the manuscript is:
"N.B.--The poor dear soul meant nothing of all this."
He meant it--and yet he did not mean it. It was the emphasised and
exaggerated expression of what he meant--momentarily emphasised for the
purpose, whether conscious or unconscious, of relieving himself from the
black mood which had descended on him. The relief was gained--though it
was not to be permanent. He did not "leave England for ever"--not
yet--but hied him to the haunts of the world as he had promised. He
plunged into pleasure--and found pleasure more pleasant than he had
imagined that it could be.
That was inevitable. He was only twenty-four, and he was famous; and "to
be famous when one is young--that is the dream of the gods." Moreover, he
was achieving just that sort of fame which is attended by the most
intoxicating joy. The fame of the man of science is nothing--the world
interests itself in his discovery but not in him. The fame of a statesman
is hardly sweeter--it is only won by fighting and working hard and making
jealous enemies. The fame of a poet--a poet who is also _the_ poet--brings
instantaneously the applause of men and the wonder and homage of women.
They do not separate the man from his work, but insist on associating him
with it. Beautiful women as well as blue-stockings--and with less critical
discrimination than blue-stockings--prostrate and abase themselves before
him, competing for the sunshine of his smiles, believing, or affecting to
believe, that his and theirs are kindred souls.
So it befell Byron. Born in exile, he had at last returned from exile in a
blaze of triumph. All the doors of all the best houses were thrown open to
him with a blare of trumpets. He entered them, not as a parvenu, like
Moore the Irish grocer's son, but as the one man without whose presence
the festival would have been incomplete. No man, if one might judge by
externals, had ever a better chance of making a splendid and noble pageant
of his life. So far as an observer could judge--so far probably as he
himself knew--the ghosts of the past were laid, and its memories in a fair
way of being effaced. If the past had not come back to him, he might have
forgotten it. The tragedy of his life was that it did come back--that he
did meet Mary Chaworth again and rediscover the secret orchard which,
while she was absent from it, was a howling wilderness, overgrown with
weeds.
But not quite immediately. There were certain other things which had to
happen first.
CHAPTER XI
LADY CAROLINE LAMB
The record of Byron's social triumphs may be outlined in a few sentences.
Without quite losing sight of such old friends as Hodgson and Harness, he
moved, with the air of a social conqueror in three new sets, which may be
regarded as distinct, though there were points at which they touched each
other. Among men of letters his chief friends were Samuel Rogers, the
banker poet, then a man verging on fifty, whose superlative dinner we have
seen him refusing to eat, and Thomas Moore, who had made his acquaintance
by demanding satisfaction for an alleged affront in "English Bards," which
Byron had explained away. At the same time he "got on very well," as he
tells us, with Beau Brummell and the other dandies, being one of the three
men of letters who were admitted to Watiers, and was lionised in the
society which we should nowadays describe as "smart."
It has been written that the roadway opposite to his apartments was
blocked by liveried footmen conveying perfumed notes. That, we may take
it, is a picturesque exaggeration; but, no doubt, he received more
invitations than the laws of time and space allowed him to accept--most
of them, though by no means all of them, to the great Whig houses. Lady
Westmorland, Lady Jersey, Lady Holland, and Lady Melbourne were the most
fashionable of the hostesses who competed for the privilege of his
company; and Lady Melbourne had a daughter-in-law--Lady Caroline Lamb. She
also had a niece--Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke; but it is of Lady Caroline
Lamb that we must speak first.
Lady Caroline was three years older than Byron. She was the daughter of
the third Earl of Bessborough, and the wife of William Lamb, who, as Lord
Melbourne, afterwards became Prime Minister of England. It was a matter of
opinion whether she was beautiful; it was also a matter of opinion whether
she was sane--doctors consulted on that branch of the subject had returned
doubtful, non-committal answers. She was not exactly mad, they said, but
she was of a temperament allied to madness. She must not be pressed to
study, but must be allowed to run wild and do as she liked.
She had run wild, for years, reading the works of Burns, which are not
written for the young, and galloping about parks on bare-backed steeds,
imagining the world about her instead of realising it, and, of course,
imagining it wrong. It is on record that she believed that
bread-and-butter was a natural product and that horses were fed on beef;
also that she divided the community into two classes--dukes and
beggars--and supposed that the former would always, by some law of
nature, remain wealthy, whatever they did with their money. Her charm--and
she could be very charming when she liked--was that of a high-spirited,
irresponsible, wilful, wayward child. She was, in short, the kind of girl
whom those who loved her best would describe, in the vernacular, as "a
handful."
[Illustration: _Lady Caroline Lamb._]
"Of all the Devonshire House girls," William Lamb had said, "that is the
one for me." That was when she was thirteen; and six years later he was
still of the same opinion. He was confirmed in it when she refused his
offer of marriage, proposing instead to run away with him in boy's clothes
and act as his secretary. He accepted neither his dismissal nor her
alternative suggestion, but persevered in his suit until he was accepted.
The next thing that happened was that Lady Caroline broke into railing
accusations against the bishop who performed the marriage rites, tore her
wedding dress to tatters, and had to be carried to her carriage in a
fainting fit. It was not a very auspicious commencement of married life,
but one which prepares us for the general reflections on marriage found in
her husband's common-place book, recently edited by Mr. Lloyd Sanders:
"The general reason against marriage is that two minds, however
congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the
other, can never act like one. It is the nature of human beings that
no man can be free or independent...."
"... By marriage you place yourself on the defensive instead of the
offensive in society...."
"Every man will find his own private affairs more difficult to control
than any public affairs on which he may be engaged...."
William Lamb's experience of married life was to be, as it were, an object
lesson on those texts. At one moment Lady Caroline was to overwhelm him
with doting affection; at the next to make him ridiculous. Sometimes the
two moods followed each other as quickly as the thunder follows the
lightning, as in the case of a scene of which the Kembles were involuntary
witnesses when staying in the same hotel with the Lambs in Paris.
Husband and wife had quarrelled in their presence, and had then withdrawn
to their apartment which faced the rooms which the Kembles occupied. The
lamps were lighted, and the blinds were not drawn, so that the Kembles
looked across the courtyard and saw what happened. William Lamb was in his
arm-chair. Lady Caroline first sat on his knee, and then slid to his feet,
looking up into his face with great humility. This for a few moments. Then
something that William Lamb said once more disturbed Lady Caroline's
equanimity. In an instant she was on her feet, running round the room,
pursued by her husband, sweeping mirrors, candlesticks, and crockery on to
the floor, in a veritable whirlwind of passion; whereupon William Lamb
drew the blind and the Kembles saw no more.
That story may serve as a symbolic epitome of William Lamb's married life.
We shall come to many stories of the same kind as we proceed. Lady
Caroline was a creature of impulse, and there was nearly always a man in
the case. She easily persuaded herself that any man who was polite to her
was in love with her--both Moore and Rogers were among the victims of whom
she boasted--and she would not allow the contrary to be suggested.
Moreover, besides being self-willed in matters of the heart, she liked to
_afficher_ herself with every man for whom she felt a preference, and to
declare the state of her affections to the world with the insistent
emphasis with which the sensational virtues of soaps and sauces are set
forth on the hoardings.
Whether she deliberately sought notoriety, or merely did what she chose to
do without fear of it, remains, to this hour, an open question. All that
is certain is that she did, in fact, make herself very notorious indeed,
and that there was more scandal than subtlety in her attempts to
monopolise Byron, to whose heart she laid siege, with all the audacity of
a stage adventuress, in the presence of a large, amused, and interested
audience.
It was Lady Westmorland who introduced them. She did not introduce Byron
to Lady Caroline, but Lady Caroline to Byron. Already, only a few days
after the appearance of "Childe Harold," he was on his pedestal, and was
not expected to descend from it, even to show deference to ladies. "He
has a club-foot and bites his nails," Rogers had told her. "If he is as
ugly as Æsop I must know him," she had answered. But now that she was
brought to him, she shrank from him, whether because she was afraid, or
because she wished to provoke and pique him. "I looked earnestly at him,"
she told Lady Morgan, "and turned on my heel"; and she went home and wrote
in her diary the impression that Byron was "mad, bad, and dangerous to
know."
That was the first scene in the comedy. The second took place at Holland
House, and the third at Melbourne House. Lady Caroline's recollections of
them were recorded in Lady Morgan's reminiscences:
"I was sitting with Lord and Lady Holland when he was announced. Lady
Holland said, 'I must present Lord Byron to you.' Lord Byron said,
'That offer was made to you before; may I ask why you rejected it?' He
begged permission to come and see me. He did so the next day. Rogers
and Moore were standing by me: I had just come in from riding. I was
filthy and heated. When Lord Byron was announced, I flew out of the
room to wash myself. When I returned, Rogers said, 'Lord Byron, you
are a happy man. Lady Caroline has been sitting here in all her dirt
with us, but when you were announced, she flew to beautify herself.'
Lord Byron wished to come and see me at eight o'clock, when I was
alone. I said he might."
He did; and "from that moment for more than nine months he almost lived at
Melbourne House." The rest, in Lady Caroline's opinion--at all events in
one of her opinions, expressed in an angry letter--was all William Lamb's
fault.
"He cared nothing for my morals," she remarks. "I might flirt and go
about with what men I pleased. He was privy to my affair with Lord
Byron and laughed at it. His indolence renders him insensible to
everything. When I ride, play, and amuse him, he loves me. In sickness
and suffering he deserts me."
That protest, however, is wholly unjust, and only partly true. A married
woman who has no sooner met a man than she arranges to dine _tête-à-tête_
with him is hardly entitled to ascribe her flirtation to her husband's
contributory negligence. Lady Caroline not only did that, but also, in her
wilful way, plunged at once into a compromising correspondence. Her very
first letter to Byron, according to Rogers, "assured him that, if he was
in any want of money, all her jewels were at his disposal." In another
letter of approximately the same date we find her writing: "The rose Lord
Byron gave Lady Caroline Lamb died in despite of every effort made to save
it; probably from regret at its fallen fortunes."
Evidently Lady Caroline had thrown herself at Byron's head before William
Lamb guessed what was happening. Afterwards, no doubt, he knew what the
rest of the world knew. But he also knew--what the rest of the world did
not know, and what Lady Caroline herself only imperfectly realised--how
froward and changeable were his wife's moods, how great was the risk of
hysterical explosions if those moods were crossed, what a "handful" she
was, in short, and how very difficult it was to handle her, and so he left
things alone.
Leaving things alone, indeed, was William Lamb's regular formula for the
solution of the problems alike of public and of private life. He believed
that problems left alone tended to solve themselves, just as letters left
unanswered tend to answer themselves. On the whole the principle had
worked, if not ideally, yet well enough for the practical purposes of
domestic life. Things had happened before, and, being left alone, had
ceased to happen. In his desk lay a letter relating to some previous
ebullition the particulars of which are wrapped in mystery. "I think
lately, my dearest William," Lady Caroline had written, three years
before, "we have been very troublesome to each other." It was true, and it
had not mattered. The fire, if there had been a fire, had burnt itself
out. The hysterics--it is not to be doubted that there were hysterics--had
subsided with the passing of the occasion which had called them forth. The
clouds had been dispersed, and the sun had shone again. Why should not
this chapter in his domestic history repeat itself? He was very fond of
his wife; he hated rows; he wished to take no risks. The best way of
avoiding risks was to humour her.
So he humoured her, remembering how she had railed at the bishop on her
wedding day, knowing, no doubt, how little a thing might upset her mental
balance, and making every possible allowance; and the only attempt at
intervention came from Lady Melbourne, who remonstrated, not with Lady
Caroline, but with Byron. He struck an attitude, and waived the matter on
one side.
"You need not fear me," was his reply. "I do not pursue pleasure like
other men; I labour under an incurable disease and a blighted heart.
Believe me she is safe with me."
No one knows whether she was, in the narrow sense of the word, "safe" with
him or not. Rogers thought that she was, but admitted that he did not
really know. In any case she was not safe from herself, or from the tongue
of scandal. She was really in love--her devotion was no passing fancy--and
she did not care who knew it. Indeed she behaved as if she thought that
the more people who knew it, the better. The woman who, at a ball, called
upon Byron's friend Harness--that very serious young Cantab just about to
take orders--to bear witness that she was wearing no fewer than six pairs
of stockings, was not likely to hide the light of a grand passion under a
bushel. She did not so hide it, but proceeded, as has been said, to
_afficher_ herself as if she were inviting the attention of the world to
a great spectacular entertainment. She had not known Byron a couple of
months before people were beginning to talk.
"Your little friend Caro William," wrote the Duchess of Devonshire on
May 4, 1812, "as usual is doing all sorts of imprudent things with
him.... The ladies, I hear spoil him, and the gentlemen are jealous of
him. He is going back to Naxos, and then the husbands may sleep in
peace. I should not be surprised if Caro William were to go with him,
she is so wild and imprudent."
Rogers, in his "Table Talk," is still more picturesque. He tells us how,
when Byron and Lady Caroline quarrelled, she used to plant herself in his
(Rogers') garden, waiting to catch him on his return home and beg him to
effect a reconciliation; and he continues:
"When she met Byron at a party, she would always, if possible, return
home from it in _his_ carriage, and accompanied by _him_: I recollect
particularly their returning to town together from Holland House. But
such was the insanity of her passion for Byron that sometimes, when
not invited to a party where he was to be, she would wait for him in
the street till it was over! One night, after a great party at
Devonshire House, to which Lady Caroline had not been invited, I saw
her--yes, saw her--talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into
the carriage which he had just entered."
In the midst of, and in consequence of, these spectacles, Lady Melbourne
decided to take Lady Caroline to Ireland. She cherished, it seems, the
double design of getting her daughter-in-law out of Byron's way and
marrying Byron to her niece. Of the success of the latter scheme there
will be a good deal to be said in subsequent chapters. Much was to happen,
however, both to Byron and to Lady Caroline before it succeeded. They
continued to correspond during Lady Caroline's absence; and the
correspondence soon reached an acute phase which resulted in a series of
violent scenes.
CHAPTER XII
THE QUARREL WITH LADY CAROLINE--HER CHARACTER AND SUBSEQUENT CAREER
"While in Ireland," Lady Caroline Lamb told Lady Morgan, "I received
letters constantly--the most tender and the most amusing."
She received one letter in which Byron, after speaking of "a sense of duty
to your husband and mother" declared that "no other in word or deed shall
ever hold the place in my affections which is, and shall be, most sacred
to you," and concluded: "I was and am yours freely and most entirely, to
obey, to honour, love--and fly with you when, where, and how you yourself
_might_ and _may_ determine." What did he mean?
Apparently he meant to let Lady Caroline down gently--to give her the
right of boasting of his undying regard--and to obtain his liberty in
exchange. We need not stop to consider whether the bargain would have been
a fair one, for Lady Caroline did not agree to it. There were no bounds to
her infatuation, and she could not bear the thought that there should be
any bounds to his. But there were. "Even during our intimacy," he told
Medwin, "I was not at all constant to this fair one, and she suspected as
much." It looks as though her suspicions decided her to return to
England. At all events she started, and at Dublin, received another letter
to which the epithets "tender" and "amusing" were equally inapplicable.
"It was," she told Lady Morgan, "that cruel letter I have published in
'Glenarvon'"--the novel in which, some five years later, she gave the
world her version of the liaison. The text of it, as given in 'Glenarvon,'
is as follows:
"I am no longer your lover; and since you oblige me to confess it by
this truly unfeminine persecution, learn that I am attached to
another, whose name it would, of course, be dishonest to mention. I
shall ever remember with gratitude the many instances I have received
of the predilection you have shown in my favour. I shall ever continue
your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself. And
as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice: correct your
vanity, which is ridiculous: exert your absurd caprices on others; and
leave me in peace."
Byron appears to have admitted to Medwin that "a part" of the letter was
genuine. The rest of it--the gratuitously offensive part of it--was
doubtless doctored, if not actually fabricated, by the novelist for the
purposes of her art. In any case, however, quite enough was written to
send Lady Caroline into a fit, from which she only recovered to renew her
eccentricities. "I lost my brain," she confesses. "I was bled, leeched;
kept for a month in the filthy Dolphin Inn at Rock. On my return I was in
great prostration of mind and spirit." And then scenes followed--scene on
the heels of scene. It is impossible to be quite sure of arranging them in
their proper order; but that matters little.
There was a scene in Brocket Park, where Lady Caroline burnt Byron in
effigy. Together with his effigy she burnt copies of his letters, keeping
the originals for reference. A number of girls, attired in white, danced
round the pyre, chanting a dirge which she had composed for the occasion:
"_Is this Guy Faux you burn in effigy?
Why bring the Traitor here? What is Guy Faux to me?
Guy Faux betrayed his country, and his laws.
England revenged the wrong; his was a public cause.
But I have private cause to raise this flame.
Burn also those, and be their fate the same._"
And also:
"_Burn, fire, burn, while wondering Boys exclaim,
And gold and trinkets glitter in the flame.
Ah! look not thus on me, so grave, so sad;
Shake not your heads, nor say the Lady's mad._"
Et cetera.
Then there was a scene in Byron's chambers, whither Lady Caroline pursued
him in order to obtain confirmation of certain suspicions, thus described
by Byron to Medwin:
"In order to detect my intrigues she watched me, and earthed a lady
into my lodgings--and came herself, terrier-like, in the disguise of a
carman. My valet, who did not see through the masquerade, let her in:
when to the despair of Fletcher, she put off the man and put on the
woman. Imagine the scene! It was worthy of Faublas!"
After that, according to Medwin, it was agreed that, if they met, they
were to meet as strangers; but Lady Caroline did not carry out her part of
the agreement. "We were at a ball," the reporter represents Byron as
saying. "She came up and asked me if she might waltz. I thought it
perfectly indifferent whether she waltzed or not, or with whom, and told
her so, in different terms, but with much coolness. After she had
finished, a scene occurred, which was in the mouths of everyone." Fanny
Kemble, however, gives a more sensational version of the story.
"Lady Caroline," she says, "with impertinent disregard of Byron's
infirmity, asked him to waltz. He contemptuously replied, 'I cannot, and
you nor any other woman ought not.'" Whereupon, the narrator continues,
Lady Caroline rushed into the dressing-room, threw up the window, and
tried to throw herself out of it, exclaiming with Saint-Preux: "_La roche
est escarpée; l'eau est profonde!_" Then, saved by someone who saw her
intention and caught hold of her skirts, she asked for water, bit a piece
out of the glass which was handed to her, and tried to stab herself with
it, but was ultimately persuaded to return home and go to bed.
Fact and fancy, no doubt, are inextricably woven together in that
narrative. All that is quite certain is that Lady Caroline did go home,
and that her temper became so ungovernable that William Lamb, who also, in
spite of his easy-going ways, had a temper, proposed a separation. The
proposal was agreed to, and the family lawyer was instructed to draw up
the deed. He drew it up; but when he brought it to the house to be signed,
sealed, and delivered, he found Lady Caroline sitting on her husband's
knee, "feeding him," says his biographer, "with tiny scraps of transparent
bread and butter." His professional tact bade him retire before this
unexpected tableau; and the separation was postponed for twelve years.
That is practically the whole of the story, so far as Byron is concerned
with it. Lady Caroline was to write him other letters to which it will be
necessary to refer as we proceed; but she had now passed out of his life,
even if he had not passed out of hers. Other urgent interests were
springing up to occupy him; and he had once more heard the _leit motif_
for which we always have to listen when we find his actions, his letters,
and his poems perplexing us.
Society--that is to say, the women of society--blamed him for his conduct;
but the blame, if it is to have any sting in it, seems to require the
assumption that every woman has a right to every man's heart if she
demands it with sufficient emphasis, and that any man who refuses to
honour the demand is, _ipso facto_, "behaving badly." Women, perhaps, are
a little more ready to make that assumption than are philosophers to allow
its validity. Granting the assumption, we shall be bound to admit that
Byron did treat Lady Caroline shamefully; but suppose we do not grant
it--then, perhaps, our chief task will be to search for excuses for Lady
Caroline herself.
The excuses to which she is entitled are those which were very obviously
made for her by her husband and his mother. They did not quarrel with her,
though they sometimes lost their temper with her; and--what is more to the
purpose--they did not quarrel with Byron. Evidently, therefore, they held
the view that Lady Caroline was responsible for Byron's conduct--but could
not be held responsible for her own. They had the doctor's word for it
that, though she was not mad, she might easily become so. If she was to be
kept sane, she must be humoured. In humouring her up to a point, Byron had
acted for the best. Neither a husband nor a mother-in-law could blame him
for his unwillingness to go beyond that point. His proposal to fly with
her may strike one as excessive; but it may perhaps be classed with the
promises sometimes made to passionate children in the hope of keeping them
quiet till the passion passes. There is really no reason to think that
either William Lamb or Lady Melbourne regarded it in any other light.
It was "really from the best motives," Byron assured Hodgson, that "I
withdrew my homage." The best motives, as we shall perceive, were mixed
with other motives; but they were doubtless there. Byron could justly
speak of himself as "restoring a woman to her family, who are treating her
with the greatest kindness, and with whom I am on good terms." It was only
to be expected that he would be flattered by her attentions when he was
twenty-four and new to society. It was equally to be expected that he
should execute a retreat when he realised that he had to do with a
_détraquée_ whose pursuit at once threatened a scandal and made him as
well as her husband look ridiculous.
The proofs that her mind was unhinged are ample. "She appears to me,"
wrote Lady H. Leveson Gower to Lady G. Morpeth, "in a state very little
short of insanity, and my aunt describes it as at times having been very
decidedly so." That is an example of the direct evidence; and the
circumstantial evidence is even more abundant. The scene at the ball, of
which Lady Caroline herself gave a spluttering account in a rambling and
incoherent letter to Medwin, is only a part of it. An attempt which she
made to forge Byron's signature in order to obtain his portrait from John
Murray points to the same conclusion. The inconsistent and inconsequential
picture which she draws of herself in her letters and her writings affords
the most conclusive testimony of all.
From the correspondence and other documents one could not possibly gather
whether she preferred her husband to her lover or her lover to her
husband; whether she "worshipped" Byron for three years only or throughout
her life; whether her attachment to him ceased, or did not cease, after
her visit, in men's clothes, to his chambers; whether she did or did not
rejoice in the unhappiness of his married life. On all these points she
repeatedly contradicted herself with the excessive emphasis of the
hysterical. To say that Byron's treatment of her drove her mad would be to
talk nonsense. At the most it only gave an illusion of method to her
madness, and supplied the monomania for which her unbalanced mind was
waiting.
William Lamb humoured her long after Byron had ceased to do so. She knew
it, and, in her comparatively lucid intervals, appreciated both his
forbearance and his character. "Remember," she wrote to Lady Morgan, "the
only noble fellow I ever met with is William Lamb; he is to me what Shore
was to Jane Shore." She also placed "William Lamb first" in the order of
the objects of her affection; but, in the very letter in which she did so,
she spoke of "Lord Byron, that dear, that angel, that misguided and
misguiding Byron, whom I adore." We must make what we can of it; but, in
truth, there is nothing to be made of it except that Lady Caroline was
mad. Presently she became so obviously mad that she smashed her doctor's
watch in a fit of rage and had to be placed in the charge of two female
keepers.
There came a day when, riding near Brocket, she met a funeral procession,
and was told that it was Byron's. Then she fainted; and it was after that
incident that her uncontrollable violence caused the long-postponed
separation to be carried into effect. Some verses which she wrote on the
occasion are printed among Lord Melbourne's papers:
"_Loved One! No tear is in mine eye,
Though pangs my bosom thrill,
For I have learned, when others sigh,
To suffer and be still.
Passion, and pride, and flattery strove,
They made a wreck of me;
But oh, I never ceased to love,
I never loved but thee._"
There are two other--very similar--stanzas. The inadequacy of the
expression is, perhaps, the most pathetic thing about them. A child seems
to be struggling to utter the emotions of a grown-up person--a clouded
mind, to be striving to clear itself under the influence of a sudden
shock. And the mind in truth was, at that date, very far from clear. The
drinking of laudanum mixed with brandy often helped in the clouding of it;
and the end was not very far removed.
The last illness began towards the end of 1827. William Lamb, when he
heard of it, hurried to his wife's side; devoted to her, and eager to
humour her, in spite of everything, to the last. She was "able to converse
with him and enjoy his society," and he found her "calm, patient, and
affectionate." She died of dropsy on January 28, 1828; and William Lamb
published an article consecrated to her memory in the _Literary Gazette_
in the course of the following month. One gathers from it, reading between
the lines, not only that he forgave, but that he understood. Hopes, he
admitted, had been drawn from her early years which "her maturity was not
destined to realise"; but he concluded: "Her manners, though somewhat
eccentric, and apparently, not really, affected, had a fascination which
it is difficult for any who never encountered their effect to conceive."
All this, however, though not irrelevant, is taking us a long way from
Byron, to whom it is now time to return.
CHAPTER XIII
LADY OXFORD--BYRON'S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER
Byron's separation from Lady Caroline Lamb, though suggested by Lady
Melbourne, appears to have been negotiated by Hobhouse at the instance of
Lady Bessborough. "Received a note from Lady Bessborough. Went to Byron,
who agrees to go out of town," is the entry in his Diary which reveals the
part he played. A further entry relating that Lady Caroline found him and
Lady Bessborough together, and charged them with looking like
conspirators, adds all the confirmation needed. Byron went out of town as
he had promised, stayed at Cheltenham, and presently wrote the letter in
which he told Lady Caroline that he had ceased to love her. He added
insult to injury, as Lady Caroline felt, by writing on notepaper bearing
the arms of the Countess of Oxford.
She and Lady Oxford knew each other rather well, and had been friends.
"Lady Oxford and Caroline William Lamb," we read in one of the letters of
Harriet Lady Granville, "have been engaged in a correspondence, the
subject whether learning Greek purifies or inflames the passions." The
right answer to the conundrum is, perhaps, that it depends upon the
learner--or else that it depends upon the teacher. Lady Oxford's
passions, at any rate, were, like Lady Caroline's, inflammable. She was
forty--the romantic age in the view of the philosophers; and she was
unhappily married. Byron spoke of her to Medwin as "sacrificed, almost
before she was a woman, to one whose mind and body were equally
contemptible." A less prejudiced witness, Uvedale Price, wrote to Rogers,
at the time of her death: "There could not, in all respects, be a more
ill-matched pair than herself and Lord Oxford, or a stronger instance of
the cruel sports of Venus or, rather, of Hymen."
Byron was in love with her, or thought so--he was not quite clear which
when he poured his confidences on the subject into Medwin's ear. Lady
Caroline's suspicions, to that extent, were justified. The "autumnal
charms"--it is he who calls them so--fascinated him for about eight
months. "The autumn of a beauty like hers," he said, "is preferable to the
spring in others." He added that he "had great difficulty in breaking with
her," and "once was on the point of going abroad with her, and narrowly
escaped this folly." How he escaped it--or why he avoided it--he does not
say; but perhaps we may find a reason.
Of his intentions, at any rate, there is no room for doubt. We have no
need to depend on Medwin's evidence for the full proof is in Byron's own
letters. It is mixed up with a good deal of extraneous matter, but it is
there; and a series of very brief citations will present the romance,
such as it was, in outline:
To William Bankes on September 12, 1812: "The only persons I know are
the Rawdons and Oxfords, with some later acquaintances of less
brilliant descent. But I do not trouble them much."
To Hanson on October 22, 1812: "I am going to Lord Oxford's, Eywood,
Presteigne, Hereford."
Letters are dated from Presteigne on October 31, November 8, and November
16. A letter of November 22 begins, "On my return here (Cheltenham) from
Lord Oxford's." A January letter shows Byron once again at Lord Oxford's;
and then the references to the contemplated foreign tour--letters of which
there is no mistaking the significance--begin:
To Hanson on February, 27, 1813: "It is my determination, on account
of a malady to which I am subject, and for other weighty reasons, to
go abroad again almost immediately. To this you will object; but, as
my intention cannot be altered, I have only to request that you will
assist me as far as in your power to make the necessary arrangements."
To Hanson on March 1, 1813: "Your objections I anticipated and can
only repeat that I cannot act otherwise; so pray hasten some
arrangement--for with, or without, I must go."
To Hanson on March 6, 1813: "I must be ready in April at whatever
risk--at whatever loss."
To Charles Hanson on March 24, 1813: "Pray tell your father to get the
money on Rochdale, or I must sell it directly. I must be ready by the
last week in _May_, and am consequently pressed for time. I go first
to Cagliari in Sardinia, and then on to the Levant."
To Mrs. Leigh on March 26, 1813: "I am going abroad again in June, but
should wish to see you before my departure.... On Sunday, I set off
for a fortnight for Eywood, near Presteigne, in Herefordshire--with
the _Oxfords_. I see you put on a _demure_ look at the name, which is
very becoming and matronly in you; but you won't be sorry to hear that
I am quite out of a more serious scrape with another singular
personage, which threatened me last year."
To Hanson on April 15, 1813: "I shall only be able to see you a few
days in town, as I shall sail before the 20th of May."
To Hanson on April 17, 1813: "I wish, if possible, the arrangement
with Hoare to be made immediately, as I must set off forthwith."
To John Murray on April 21, 1813: "Send in my account to Bennet
Street, as I wish to settle it before sailing."
To Hanson on June 3, 1813; "I am as determined as I have been for the
last six months.... Everything is ordered and ready now. Do not trifle
with me, for I am in very solid serious earnest.... I have made my
choice, and go I will."
To Hodgson on June 8, 1813: "I shall manage to see you somewhere
before I sail, which will be next month."
To John Murray on June 12, 1813: "Recollect that my lacquey returns in
the Evening, and that I set out for Portsmouth to-morrow."
To William Gifford on June 18, 1813: "As I do not sail quite so soon
as Murray may have led you to expect (not till July), I trust I may
have some chance of taking you by the hand before my departure."
To Mrs. Leigh, in the same month: "If you knew _whom_ I had put off
besides my journey, you would think me grown strangely fraternal."
To Moore on July 8, 1813: "The Oxfords have sailed almost a fortnight,
and my sister is in town, which is a great comfort."
That is the skeleton of the romance. Such clothes as it is felt to need
the imagination must provide. Byron's position seems to have been
perilously near that of a "tame cat," though he might have preferred to
call himself, then, as on a later occasion, a _cavaliere servente_. His
excuse is that he was only twenty-five, and that a fascinating woman of
forty can be very fascinating indeed, and very clever at getting her own
way. Her attempt to annex Byron, though she was fifteen years his senior,
may be viewed as her gambler's throw for happiness. She threw and
lost--but she lost quietly. She resembled Lady Caroline in being romantic,
but she differed from her in not being "obstreperous." There was no
scandal for society to take note of, and the welkin never rang with her
complaints, though she did walk about Rome displaying Byron's portrait at
her girdle.
Nor did it ring with Byron's, who, indeed, had nothing to complain of. The
few allusions to the affair which Hobhouse contributes throw very little
light upon it. He notes, in one place, that Lady Oxford was "most uncommon
in her talk and licentious." He adds, on another page, the memorandum:
"Got a picture of Lady Oxford from Mrs. Mee. Lord B.'s money for it." That
is all; and there are no hints to be derived from "occasional" verses.
However much Lady Oxford may have pleased Byron, she did not inspire him.
The period of his intimacy with her was, from the literary point of view,
a singularly barren period; and the allusions cited from the letters--they
are all the allusions that can be cited--are chiefly instructive because
of the difference between their tone and the tone of certain other letters
written very soon afterwards.
There is no suggestion in them of deep sentiment. What they do suggest
is--first, a young man desperately determined to go through with a
desperate adventure, and very much afraid of being warned of the
consequences of his folly--then a young man who, having a haunting doubt
of his own sincerity, shouts to keep up his courage--finally a young man
who is grateful to the circumstances, whatever they may have been, which
have deflected him from a rash course, and saved him from himself. One
turns a few pages, and finds Byron writing in a very different strain:
"I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at
this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any
of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is
unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women."
"I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour
to-morrow--that is, I would a month ago, but at present...."
"Some day or other, when we are _veterans_, I may tell you a tale of
present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I
do not tell you now.... All this would be very well if I had no heart;
but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thing still about
me, though in no very good repair, and also that it has a habit of
attaching itself to _one_, whether I will or no."
These passages are from letters to Moore. A few days before writing the
last of them Byron had written to Miss Milbanke, whom he was shortly to
marry:
"I am at present a little feverish--I mean mentally--and, as usual, on
the brink of something or other, which will probably crush me at last,
and cut our correspondence short, with everything else."
No names are mentioned here; but certain inferences not only can, but
inevitably must, be drawn. At some time towards the end of the summer of
1813, there was a crisis of Byron's life. It did not come to a head until
after Lady Oxford's departure, and Lady Oxford had nothing whatever to do
with it. The latter point not only follows from the sudden disappearance
of Lady Oxford from Byron's sphere of interest, but is specifically made
in a letter (dated November 8, 1813) from Byron to his sister:
"MY DEAREST AUGUSTA,
"I have only time to say that my long silence has been occasioned by a
thousand things (with which _you_ are not concerned). It is not Lady
Caroline, nor Lady Oxford; _but perhaps you may guess_, and if you do,
do not tell. You do not know what mischief your being with me might
have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow: in the meantime
don't be alarmed. I am in _no immediate_ peril."
Those are the most significant of the letters, though there are others.
Even if they stood alone, one would feel sure that there was a story
behind them; but they do not stand alone. We have the poems to set beside
them, and we have also the journal which Byron kept from November 14, 1813
till April 19, 1814. Letters, poems, and journal, read in conjunction,
furnish a clue which it is impossible to mistrust. The distinction of
having first so read them with sufficient care to find the clue belongs to
Mr. Richard Edgcumbe.
Possibly Mr. Edgcumbe has proved just a little too much--that question
will have to be faced when we come to it; but our immediate task must be
to track the story along the lines which he has indicated, and see how all
the mysteries connected with Byron can be solved, and all the emotional
inconsistencies of his life unified, by the recollection that, of all the
many passions of his life, there was only one which really mattered to
him.
Many women were welcome to love him if they liked--he was a man very ready
to let himself be loved; but only one woman had the power to make him
suffer--and that woman was Mary Chaworth. The motto "Cherchez la femme"
may, in short, in his case, be particularised. Whenever his conduct and
his utterances seem, on the face of it, inexplicable, we have to look for
Mary Chaworth and see her re-asserting a power which has been allowed to
lapse; and we will turn to look for her now.
CHAPTER XIV
AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS--THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN TRAVEL, AND OF MARY
CHAWORTH
The poems written during the dark period of Byron's life which we have now
to consider are "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," and
"Lara." Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his introduction to "The Bride of
Abydos," attributed the gloom to the fact that Byron "had been staying at
Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had
fallen in love with his friend's wife, Lady Frances." It will be time
enough to treat that suggestion seriously when more evidence is offered in
support of it. The one important reference to Lady Frances in the Letters
certainly does not bear it out:
"I stayed a week with the Websters, and behaved very well, though the
lady of the house is young, religious, and pretty, and the master is
my particular friend. I felt no wish for anything but a poodle dog,
which they kindly gave me."
That is all; and it is not in tune with those allusions, veiled by
asterisks, to a consuming and destroying passion, with which the Journal
is thickly sprinkled. On the other hand the open references to Mary
Chaworth scattered throughout Byron's autobiographical utterances are
perfectly in tune with these enigmatical invocations of an Unknown Lady.
Even if it could not be shown that she and Byron met during this period of
mental anguish, we should still be tempted to conjecture that she and the
Unknown Lady were one; and, as a matter of fact, we know that they did
meet, and also know enough of the terms on which they met to be able to
clear up the situation beyond much possibility of doubt. The key to it,
indeed, is the letter written by Byron to Mary Chaworth five years after
their final separation:
"My own, we may have been very wrong, but I repent of nothing except
that cursed marriage, and your refusing to continue to love me as you
had loved me. I can neither forget nor _quite forgive_ you for that
precious piece of reformation. But I can never be other than I have
been, and whenever I love anything, it is because it reminds me in
some way or other of yourself."
That letter by itself proves practically the whole case. It does not
matter whether it is his own marriage or Mary Chaworth's that Byron speaks
of as "cursed"--the epithet may well have seemed to him equally applicable
to either union. The essential point is that Byron could not conceivably
have written in this tone to Mary Chaworth in 1818 if he had had no
relations, or only formal relations, with her since 1809. The mere
fact--the only openly acknowledged fact--that she had jilted him when he
was a schoolboy would certainly not have warranted him in reproaching her
with "refusing to continue to love" at a date thirteen years subsequent to
his rejection. The letter obviously, and undeniably, implies an intimacy
of later date in which his passion was reciprocated.
Later acquaintance, indeed, apart from intimacy, can easily be
demonstrated, in spite of the suppressions of the biographers. "I remember
meeting her," Byron himself said to Medwin, "after my return from Greece";
and the statement is confirmed, as Medwin's statements generally need to
be, from other sources. It appears from Byron's own letters that Mary
Chaworth, or some member of her family, took charge of his robes after one
of his attendances at the House of Lords; and a letter from Mary Chaworth
to Byron, in the possession of Mr. Murray, is printed by Mr. Edgcumbe. It
speaks of a seal which Byron was having made for her. The seal is still in
existence, and is in the possession of the Musters family. The approximate
date of its presentation is fixed by an entry in Byron's journal:
"Mem. I must get a toy to-morrow for Eliza, and send the device for
the seals of myself and ----."
Here, at any rate, we get one clear case in which the asterisks in the
Journal not only appear to indicate Mary Chaworth, but cannot possibly
indicate anybody else. It does not follow, of course, that we are entitled
to insert her name wherever we encounter asterisks--for Byron and his
editors have, from time to time, had various reasons for thus concealing
various names; but the cases in which the asterisks do refer to her are,
when once this clue is provided, tolerably easy to distinguish. Furnished
with the clue, we can at once unravel the skein of events and construct a
consistent picture of these critical months in Byron's career; and we may
begin with the picture which he drew of himself to Medwin:
"I was at this time," he says, "a mere Bond Street lounger--a great
man at lobbies, coffee and gambling houses: my afternoons were passed
in visits, luncheons, lounging, and boxing--not to mention drinking."
This is true, and yet, at the same time, it is not true. The picture is,
at once, confirmed by the Letters and the Journal and contradicted by
them. It is a picture in which, so to say, all the lights are glaring, and
all the shadows are left out. The truest thing in it is the after-thought,
added a few sentences lower down; "Don't suppose, however, that I took any
pleasure in all these excesses." In that moody claim we get, of course,
the reflection, or recollection, of the Byronic pose; and at this period,
if not at all periods, there was grim reality behind the pose, and Byron
fully justifies the description of him as the most sincere man who ever
struck an attitude.
It would be easy to depict him, whether from his letters or from
contemporary memoirs, as the dissipated darling of society. The year 1813
was the year in which he and Madame de Staël were the rival lions of the
season, roaring against each other, not entirely without jealousy. The
list of his social engagements, if one troubled to draw it out, would have
a very formidable appearance. It would show him going everywhere, meeting
everybody, doing everything. We should see him at the great houses, such
as Lady Melbourne's, Lady Holland's, Lady Jersey's. We should discover him
at the opera and the theatre, now in their boxes, now in his own, and at
men's dinners, with Sheridan, and Rogers, "Conversation Sharp," and other
brilliant talkers. We should also find him patronising "the fancy," and
losing his money at hazard, and drinking several bottles of claret at a
sitting--retiring to bed in a sublime state of exaltation, and rising from
it with a shocking headache.
That, however, would only be one half the picture. Many contemporary
observers remarked that Byron passed through the haunts of pleasure with a
scowl, and that his face wore a frown whenever his features were in
repose. One would infer from that, not that Byron, while really enjoying
himself, posed, for the sake of effect, as a man who was secretly eating
his heart out, but rather that some secret trouble was actually gnawing at
his heart while he made the gestures of a man of pleasure; and the Letters
and the Journal--more particularly the Journal--give us many glimpses at
this darker side of his life. If he often accepted the invitations which
continued to be showered on him, he also frequently declined them, locking
himself up alone in his chambers to read, and write, and think things
out--persuading himself, after some months had lapsed, that he had really
been very little into society, and that it was a matter of indifference to
him whether he went into it again or not.
And this, it will be observed, is a new note which only begins to be
sounded in his intimate writings towards the end of the summer of 1813,
after he has allowed Lady Oxford to go abroad alone. There is nothing like
it in the days of his dalliance with her. Still less is there anything
like it in the writings of the days of his dalliance with Lady Caroline
Lamb. Those episodes and adventures, it is quite clear, only touched the
surface of his nature. He first pursued them, and then ceased to pursue
them, with laughter on his lips, and self-satisfaction--one might even say
jollity--in his heart. There was not even anything in them to cradle him
into song. The interval between the "Thyrza" poems and the passionate
allegorical tales of which "The Giaour" was the first--an interval of some
eighteen months--was poetically uneventful. A period of feverish activity
succeeded; and it coincided with a renewal of relations with Mary
Chaworth.
Mary Chaworth had lived unhappily with the handsome squire whom she had,
so naturally, preferred to the fat boy from Harrow. He had been, as these
red-faced, full-blooded Philistines are so apt to be, at once jealous,
unfaithful, and brutal, wanting to "have it both ways,"--to push rivals
brusquely out of his path, and to pursue his own coarse pleasures where he
chose. He had forbidden his wife to see Byron. He had insisted upon her
absence from Annesley at the time of Byron's return from Greece; and he
had found her, whether willingly or unwillingly, compliant. But he had
also, by his own conduct, caused scandals which had set the tongues of the
neighbours wagging; and, in doing that, he had presumed too far. There had
been a separation by mutual consent; and it was after the separation that
the meeting with Byron took place.
There was little about him now to remind Mary of the fat boy whom she had
laughed at. The Turkish baths, the Epsom salts, and the regimen of
biscuits and soda-water had done their work. He came to her as a man of
ethereal beauty, fascinating manners, and undisputed genius; and he left
other women--women of higher rank, greater importance, and more widely
acknowledged charm--in order to come to her. Nor did he come with the
triumphant air of a man who was resolved to dazzle her in order to avenge
a slight. He came, as it were, because he could not help himself--because
he felt cords drawing him--because this was his destiny and he must fulfil
it, though he forfeited the whole world in doing so.
Her case was hard. She was not one of the women who readily do desperate
things in scorn of consequence. The traditions of her class, the claims of
her family--the precepts, also, one imagines, of her religion--had too
strong a hold on her for that. These very hesitations, no doubt,--so
different from the "on coming" ways of Lady Caroline, and Lady Oxford's
"terrible love," as Balzac phrases it, "of the woman of forty"--were a
part of her charm for Byron. But she was very unhappy, and Byron was
offering her a little happiness; and it was very, very difficult for her
to refuse the gift. So the history of the matter seems, in a sentence or
two, to have been this: that she was slow to yield, but yielded; that she
had no sooner yielded than she repented; that her repentance left Byron a
desperate, heart-broken man, profoundly cynical about women--so cynical
about them that he could speak even of her, while he still loved her, to
Medwin, as "like the rest of her sex, far from angelic"--ready to marry
out of pique, or from any other motive equally unworthy.
The details must remain obscure. They passed in the secret orchard; and
Byron was not, like Victor Hugo, a man who treated his secret orchard as a
park to be thrown open to excursionists. He knew that there was a time to
keep silence as well as a time to speak; and though there were some
episodes in his life of which he spoke too much, of this particular
episode he only spoke to Moore and Mrs. Leigh, whom he could trust. Yet,
given the clues, the story constructs itself; and we must either believe
the story which arises out of those clues, or else believe that the most
passionate poems which Byron ever wrote were the outcome of a spiritual
crisis about nothing in particular. And that, of course, is absurd.
We find him, at the beginning of the crisis, pondering two escapes from
it--the escape by way of marriage, and the escape by way of foreign
travel. He talks, in the middle of July, of proposing to Lady Adelaide
Forbes; he talks, at the end of August, of proposing to anyone who is
likely to accept him; but in neither instance does he talk like a man who
really means what he says. This is the July announcement:
"My circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects
blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman had I a
chance.... The Staël last night said that I had no feeling, was
totally _in_sensible to _la belle passion_, and _had_ been all my
life. I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before."
Then in August he writes:
"After all, we must end in marriage; and I can conceive nothing more
delightful than such a state in the country, reading the county
newspaper, &c., and kissing one's wife's maid. Seriously, I would
incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow--that is, I
would a month ago, but at present----."
The word "seriously" there is evidently a _façon de parler_. The writer's
mood may be serious, but his intentions evidently are not. It may be
doubted whether the thoughts of travel were any more serious, though they
lasted longer. In letter after letter we find Byron making inquiries about
a passage in a ship of war bound for the Levant. When such a passage is
offered to him, however, he declines it on the ground that he is unable to
obtain accommodation for as many servants as he desires to take with him;
and that explanation inevitably strikes one as a pretext rather than a
reason--the pretext of a man who, while he knows that it would be better
to go, is looking for an excuse to stay.
Projects of travel with his sister and with various friends fell through
at about the same time, for reasons which are nowhere stated, but can very
easily be guessed. We cannot read the letters, dark though the allusions
are, without being conscious of a thickening plot. It thickens very
perceptibly when we discover Byron at Newstead at a time when Mary
Chaworth, forsaken by her husband, is at Annesley. There is nearly a
month's gap in the published letters at this point; but conjecture can
easily fill the gap in the light of the letter from Byron to Mrs. Leigh,
already quoted, which is dated November 8:
"It is not Lady Caroline nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess,
and if you _do_, do not tell.
"You do not know what mischief your being near me might have
prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime, don't be
alarmed. I am in _no immediate_ peril."
One is further helped to understand by a letter to Moore written, after a
longer silence than usual, on November 30:
"Since I last wrote to you, much has occurred, good, bad, and
indifferent,--not to make me forget you, but to prevent me of
reminding you of one who, nevertheless, has often thought of you....
"Your French quotation was very confoundedly to the purpose,--though
very _unexpectedly_ pertinent, as you may imagine by what I _said_
before, and my silence since. However, 'Richard's himself again,' and
except all night, and some part of the morning, I don't think very
much about the matter."
The French quotation referred to is Fontenelle's: "Si je recommençais ma
carrière je ferais tout ce que j'ai fait." The inference from the allusion
to it, and from the two letters given, is quite clear. Something has
happened--at Newstead or in the neighbourhood, as the dates
demonstrate--something which Byron cannot bring himself to regret, even
though he feels that it is going to make trouble for him. Hints at the
possibility of a duel which follow in later letters make it not less clear
that the trouble--or a part of it--may come from the indignation of an
angry husband. "I shall not return his fire," Byron writes--an
indication, we may take it, that a sense of guilt, and some remorse, is
mingled with his passion.
That is what we gather, and cannot help gathering, from the letters, in
spite of their vagueness and intentional obscurity. We will take up the
thread of the story from them again in a moment. In the meanwhile we will
turn to the Journal and see how Byron presents the story to himself.
CHAPTER XV
RENEWAL AND INTERRUPTION OF RELATIONS WITH MARY CHAWORTH
The Journal is only a fragment, kept only for five months. It is a record
rather of emotions than of events--the chronicle of the emotions of a man
who feels the need of talking to himself of matters of which he cannot
easily talk to others, but who, even in speaking to himself, speaks in
riddles. It begins soon after the "mischief" of which Augusta has been
told has happened, and while he is entangled in the "scrape" mentioned to
Moore. The talk on the first page is of travel--"provided I neither marry
myself, nor unmarry any one else in the interval"; and there immediately
follows a reference to the writing of "The Bride of Abydos":
"I believe the composition of it kept me alive--for it was written to
drive my thoughts from the recollection of--
"_Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal'd._"
"At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it."
"The Bride," he insists, was written for himself, and not with any view to
publication. "I am sure, had it not been for Murray, _that_ would never
have been published, though the circumstances which are the groundwork
make it ... heigho!" "It was written," he adds, "in four days to distract
my thoughts from * * *"; and then we perceive that he is in correspondence
with the lady thus enigmatically designated. He is expecting a letter from
her which does not arrive. What, he asks himself, is the meaning of that?
"Not a word from * * * Have they set out from * * *? or has my last
precious epistle fallen into the lion's jaws? If so--and this silence
looks suspicious--I must clap on my 'musty morion' and 'hold out my
iron.' I am out of practice--but I won't begin again at Manton's now.
Besides, I would not return his shot. I was once a famous
wafer-splitter; but then the bullies of society made it necessary.
Ever since I began to feel that I had a bad cause to support, I have
left off the exercise."
The probability of a challenge from an injured husband is evidently
contemplated here. No challenge came, the injured man remaining in
ignorance of his injury; but peace of mind nevertheless remained
unattainable. No connected narrative, indeed, can be pieced together. It
is hardly ever possible to declare that such and such a thing happened on
such and such a day. There is only the general impression that things are
happening, and that, whether they happen or do not happen, a tragedy is
always in progress. We come presently to a curiously significant note on
the _raison d'être_ of Byron's practice of fasting:
"I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh--my bones can
well bear it. But the worst is, the devil always came with it,--till I
starved him out,--and I will _not_ be the slave of _any_ appetite. If
I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way."
But a man does not write like that unless his heart has heralded the way,
and he is following it. Byron's trouble was not that he had failed to
follow the road which his heart pointed, but that he had followed it into
an _impasse_. He had reached a point at which the only way out was the way
on; but he could not follow it alone, and his companion would not follow
it with him. She had gone a little way with him, and then taken fright at
his and her own temerity.
It is a question whether we should pity her for her lack of courage or
praise her for remembering her principles after she had yielded to
temptation; but we should need more knowledge of the facts than we have in
order to answer it with confidence. Exceptional people may do exceptional
things with impunity--it is sometimes for lack of the nerve to do them
that they make shipwreck of their lives; but though Byron was an
exceptional man, we have no proof that Mary Chaworth was an exceptional
woman. She had neither the romantic audacity of George Sand, nor that
audacity of the superior person which upheld George Eliot in her bold
misappropriation of another woman's name. Probably, if she had had it,
Byron would have classed her with the "blues," and either have tired of
her at once or turned away from her very quickly. She had, no doubt,
exceptional charm, but no exceptional strength of character. She was just
a weak woman launched into a situation to which the old rules did not
apply, but afraid to break them, ashamed of having broken them, obstinate
in her refusal to go on breaking them.
Catastrophe, in those circumstances, was inevitable. The bold course might
have led to it--for a weak woman, brought up in the fear of her
neighbours, can only take a bold course at grave risks. The weak
course--since the love of the heart and not merely the passion of the
senses was at stake--was bound to lead to it, and did. The only question
was whether the victims of the catastrophe would suffer in silence or
would cry aloud; and the answer to that question, given the characters of
the victims, could easily be predicted. Mary Chaworth would be silent,
would make believe to the best of her ability, would wear a mask, and
pose, and persuade the world that she was behaving naturally. Byron,
disdaining to pretend, proclaiming the truth about his own heart even
while respecting Mary's secret--proclaiming it quite naturally though
rather noisily--would appear to the world to be posing.
He did so; but before we observe him doing so, we may turn back to the
Journal, and study a few more of its enigmatic passages with the help of
the clues at our disposal:
"I awoke from a dream! well! and have not others dreamed? but she did
not overtake me.... Ugh! how my blood chilled,--and I could not
wake--and--heigho!... I do not like this dream,--I hate its 'foregone
conclusions.'"
"No letters to-day;--so much the better,--there are no answers. I must
not dream again;--it spoils even reality. I will go out of doors and
see what the fog will do for me."
"Ward talks of going to Holland, and we have partly discussed an
_ensemble_ expedition.... And why not? ---- is distant, and will be at
----, still more distant, till spring. No one else except Augusta
cares for me; no ties--no trammels."
"No dreams last night of the dead, nor the living; so--I am 'firm as
the marble, founded on the rock,' till the next earthquake....
"... I am tremendously in arrear with my letters--except to ----, and
to her my thoughts overpower me;--my words never compass them."
"I believe with Clym o' the Clow, or Robin Hood, 'By our Mary (dear
name!) thou art both mother and May, I think it never was a man's lot
to die before his day.'"
[Illustration: _Mary Chaworth._]
"---- has received the portrait safe; and, in answer the only remark
she makes upon it is, 'indeed it is like'--and again 'indeed it is
like.' With her the likeness 'covered a multitude of sins,' for I
happen to know this portrait was not a flatterer, but dark and
stern,--even black as the mood in which my mind was scorching last
July when I sat for it."
"I am _ennuyé_ beyond my usual tense of that yawning verb, which I am
always conjugating; and I don't find that society much mends the
matter. I am too lazy to shoot myself--and it would annoy Augusta, and
perhaps ----."
"Much done, but nothing to record. It is quite enough to set down my
thoughts,--my actions will rarely bear retrospection."
"The more I see of men the less I like them. If I could say so of
women too, all would be well. Why can't I? I am now six-and-twenty; my
passions have had enough to cool them; my affections more than enough
to wither them,--and yet, and yet, always _yet_ and _but_."
"I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eat
_itself_ again."
"I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of,
that I never am long in the society even of _her_ I love (God knows
too well, and the devil probably too) without a yearning for the
company of my lamp, and my utterly confused and tumbled-down library.
"I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch-light;
and to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory,
I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume. To be sure, I have
long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my
species before, 'O fool! I shall go mad!'"
These entries, as everyone who has read them through will have remarked,
are all variations on a single theme; and there are many more entries in
the same key, which have been left unquoted. They succeed each other, week
after week, and almost day after day, for a period of about five months.
The story of the events to which they relate has been told, and need not
be repeated. One may think of them as the cries attendant on the birth
pangs of those aspects of Byron's character and personality which the
world knows specifically as Byronism. Other tragedies, indeed, were to
come to pass--and were to be necessary--before the angry heart could dash
itself with its full force against the desolations of the world; but the
train was being laid for those tragedies too; and by the time Byron flung
his unfinished Diary down, the thing called Byronism was born.
Curiously enough, indeed, even the political Byronism can be seen coming
to birth at the time of the writing of the Journal. The Byron who was
presently, while in exile, to harbour revolutionists, and make his house
their arsenal, deride the Tsar of All the Russias as a "Billy bald-coot,"
and shake his fist in the faces of the "holy three," already begins to
reveal himself in its pages with scoffing remarks about legitimate kings
and the hereditary principle. Perhaps it is only a case of instinct
asserting itself and the imperious need to find something to scoff at
following the line of least resistance; but that does not matter. What
does matter is that here was a crisis and a turning point in Byron's
development, brought about because Mary Chaworth had come back into his
life, had passed through it, and had passed out of it again.
Mr. Richard Edgcumbe reads, and has written, still more details into the
story, startling students of Byron's biography with the suggestion that a
child was born as the result of the intimacy--that Mrs. Leigh adopted the
child and pretended that it was her own--that the child thus secretly born
and falsely acknowledged was no other than Medora Leigh, who turned out so
badly, and whose alleged autobiography was published by Charles Mackay.
Passages can be quoted from the poems--and perhaps also from the
letters--which might conceivably contain veiled allusions to such a
transaction. None, however, can be quoted which require that explanation
as an alternative to remaining unintelligible; and, in the absence of
positive evidence, all the probabilities are against Mr. Edgcumbe's
theory.
Such a secret as he hints at--and indeed almost affirms--would have been
very difficult to keep; and it is hard to believe that Mrs. Leigh's sense
of duty to her husband, with whom she was on the best of terms, would have
allowed her to be a party to the alleged conspiracy. Those are a few of
the most obvious objections; and they must be given the greater weight
because Byron's bitter cries and altered attitude towards life are more
easily explicable without Mr. Edgcumbe's hypothesis than with it. Loving
the real mother so passionately, and having such a faithful friend in the
supposed mother, he would assuredly not have been content to live out his
life in exile without ever making an attempt to see his daughter, and
without constant and particular inquiries after her. So why strain
credulity so far when, without straining it, everything can be made plain
and clear?
There was a renewal of intimacy, and then a suspension of intimacy; a fear
of a public scandal which proved to be groundless; a risk of a duel which
was, after all, avoided. That is all that is certain; but that suffices to
explain the references to "scrapes" and "mischief" and the rest of it; and
that also, on the assumption that Byron was passionately sincere, explains
the depth and disgusted vehemence of his emotions. He had dreamed of Mary
Chaworth before as the one woman in the world with whom he could live out
the whole of his life in a continuous ecstasy of intense emotion; but he
had from time to time awakened from his dream. Now the dream had become a
reality--and the reality had not lasted. She had been too high
principled--or too much afraid. He had not been strong enough to give her
courage--or to shake her principles. And therefore....
Therefore he wrote poem after poem, all on the same theme, all in the same
key--poems of farewell, of everlasting sorrow and despair, and of that
sense of guilt, not defiant as yet, of which Mr. Edgcumbe makes so much,
but which are perhaps best read as the reflection of Mary Chaworth's own
horror--the horror of a mind perilously near insanity--at the thing which
she had done, but was resolved to do no more. He wrote this, for instance:
"_There is no more for me to hope,
There is no more for thee to fear;
And, if I give my sorrow scope,
That sorrow thou shalt never hear.
Why did I hold thy love so dear?
Why shed for such a heart one tear?
Let deep and dreary silence be
My only memory of thee!_"
He wrote the well-known lines, beginning:
"_I speak not--I trace not--I breathe not thy name--
There is love in the sound--there is Guilt in the fame--
But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart._"
He wrote, again, these lines, which are taken from "Lara":
"_The tempest of his heart in scorn had gazed
On that the feebler Elements had raised.
The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high,
And asked if greater dwell beyond the sky:
Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,
How woke he from the wildness of that dream!
Alas! he told not--but he did awake
To curse the withered heart that would not break._"
And then, once more:
"_These lips are mute, these eyes are dry;
But in my breast and in my brain,
Awake the pangs that pass not by,
The thought that ne'er shall sleep again.
My soul nor deigns nor dares complain,
Though Grief and Passion there rebel:
I only know we loved in vain--
I only feel--Farewell! Farewell!_"
There is no need to quote more. Enough has been given to show how the
passionate heart found passionate utterance, and what a wound the wrench
had left. Afterwards, of course, when it was all over--or as much over as
it ever would be--Byron realised that a man of twenty-six could not well
consecrate all the rest of his years to lamentation. He had to live out
his life somehow, with the help of incident of some sort; and incident in
such a case must mean either a fresh love affair or marriage.
In Byron's case it meant marriage--the very marriage which Lady Melbourne
had designed as a distraction for him from the too-pointed attentions of
Lady Caroline Lamb.
CHAPTER XVI
MARRIAGE
Whatever doubts and mysteries environ the circumstances of Byron's
separation from his wife, there is, at any rate, nothing to perplex us in
the train of events which brought about his marriage, though the two
common and conflicting theories have to be set aside. He did not marry
Miss Milbanke for money; he did not marry her for love; he married her,
partly because he had persuaded himself that he wanted a wife, and partly
because she had made up her mind that he should do so.
He cannot have married her for money because, at that date, her fortune
was inconsiderable and her expectations were vague. She had only £10,000;
and "good lives" stood between her and the prospect of any substantial
inheritance. Seeing that Newstead, when put up to auction, was bought in
for £90,000, a dowry of £10,000 was of no particular consequence to Byron,
and if he had been fortune-hunting, he would have hunted bigger game. The
fortune which he did capture was not enough to save him from almost
instant financial embarrassments; and he faced that prospect as one who
viewed it with indifference. "She is said," he wrote to Moore, "to be an
heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall not
inquire. But I do know that she has talents and excellent qualities."
But if it is clear that Byron was not an interested, it is equally clear
that he was not a passionate, suitor. He hardly could be so soon after the
emotional stress through which we have seen him passing; and the proofs
that he was not are conclusive. The most conclusive proof of all is that
at the time when he proposed, by letter, to Miss Milbanke, he had not seen
her, or made any attempt to see her, for ten months, and that, though he
had, during those ten months, been corresponding with her, he had also,
during those ten months, been pursuing sentimental adventures with which
she had nothing to do. It was, as we have already seen, during those ten
months that the renewed relations with Mary Chaworth were broken off; and
when, after the close of those renewed relations, Byron's thoughts turned
to marriage, it was not Miss Milbanke whom he first thought of marrying.
The desire to marry, in short, had only been a particular emotion with
Byron when there was a possibility of marrying Mary Chaworth. Thereafter
it was only a general emotion--a desire for an "escape from life," and a
domestic refuge from the storms which threatened shipwreck. He was tired
of the struggle, and here was a prospect of rest. A little more than three
months before his proposal to Miss Milbanke he was thinking of proposing
to Lady Adelaide Forbes--ready to marry her, as he wrote to Moore, "with
the same indifference which has frozen over the 'Black Sea' of all my
passions." A fortnight later--almost to a day three months before the
proposal--he writes again to Moore:
"I _could_ be very sentimental now, but I won't. The truth is, that I
have been all my life trying to harden my heart, and have not yet
quite succeeded--though there are great hopes--and you do not know how
it has sunk with your departure."
Byron assuredly was not in love with Miss Milbanke when he wrote that; and
he had no opportunity of falling in love with her in the course of the
next three months, for he did not even see her. None the less he made up
his mind to ask her to marry him--as an alternative to departing on a long
foreign tour; and it is from Hobhouse's lately published narrative that we
can best see how he was led, or lured, to that decision.
Byron had first met Miss Milbanke at the time when Lady Caroline Lamb was
throwing herself at his head. Lady Caroline had shown him some verses
which Miss Milbanke had written, and he had said that he considered them
rather good--possibly because he thought so, but more probably because he
wished to be polite. Soon afterwards, he had been presented to her, and
had made her a first proposal of marriage, which she had declined.
The reasons alike for his offer and for her refusal of it remain obscure.
He must, at any rate, have liked her; he was almost certainly getting
tired of Lady Caroline's determination to monopolise and exploit him;
perhaps he was also anxious to do anything in reason to oblige Lady
Melbourne, who had the motives which we know of for desiring to bring
about the match. Whether Miss Milbanke, on her part, preferred some other
admirer or resented Lady Melbourne's attempt to make a convenience of her
is doubtful. Both motives may have operated simultaneously; and Byron, at
any rate, accepted his refusal in a philosophic spirit. It had not,
Hobhouse says, "sunk very deep into his heart or preyed upon his spirits."
He "did not pretend to regret Miss Milbanke's refusal deeply." Indeed "it
might be said that he did not pretend to regret it at all." And Hobhouse
describes a "ludicrous scene" when some common friend related that he had
been rejected by Miss Milbanke, and burst into tears over the catastrophe.
"Is that all?" said Lord Byron. "Perhaps then it will be some
consolation for you to know that I also have been refused by Miss
Milbanke."
Perhaps it was--some unsuccessful suitors are quite capable of taking
comfort from such reflections; but that need not concern us. What we have
to note is that Byron's rejection by Miss Milbanke resulted in his
engaging in a long correspondence with her; and that the commencement of
that correspondence was negotiated by Lady Melbourne. One infers that Lady
Melbourne was a very clever woman, by no means innocent of "ulterior
motives," far less ready than Byron to take "no" for an answer from Miss
Milbanke, and intuitively conscious that correspondences of this character
are apt to weave entanglements for those who engage in them.
Some extracts from the correspondence are printed in Mr. Murray's
Collected Edition of Byron's Works. There are references to it both in
Byron's Journal and in Hobhouse's Account of the Separation. There is
nothing in the text which it seems imperative to quote--nothing, that is
to say, which perceptibly helps the story along. Byron's own letters are
rather high-flown and artificial. The impression which one gathers from
them is that of a man elaborately keeping alive the double pretence that
he is unworthy and that he is disappointed--but only keeping it alive out
of politeness. The nature of Miss Milbanke's letters can only be inferred
from the one or two allusions which we find to them.
"Yesterday, a very pretty letter from Annabella, which I answered.
What an odd situation and friendship is ours!--without one spark of
love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general
lead to coldness on one side and aversion on the other. She is a very
superior woman, and very little spoiled.... She is a poetess--a
mathematician--a metaphysician, and yet withal, very kind, generous,
and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be
turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages."
That is what Byron says; but Hobhouse adds a little more. He says that
Byron at first "believed that a certain eccentricity of education had
produced this communication from a young woman otherwise notorious for the
strictest propriety of conduct and demeanour." He also says that the tone
of the communications grew in warmth as the correspondence proceeded, and
that Byron did not make up his mind to propose marriage a second time
until "after certain expressions had been dropped by Miss Milbanke in her
letters which might easily have encouraged a bolder man than his
lordship." He says finally, and this he says, in italics, that when Byron
did propose for the second time, Miss Milbanke _accepted him by return of
post_. To which piece of information Moore adds the statement that in
order to make assurance doubly sure, she sent her acceptance in duplicate
to his town and his country addresses.
It reached him at Hastings; and Miss Milbanke proceeded to impart her news
to her friends. A passage from one of the letters--that to Miss
Milner--shows not only that she was very happy in the prospect of her
marriage, but also that she had woefully deceived herself as to the
circumstances which had preceded and led up to the proposal:
"You only know me truly in thinking that without the highest moral
esteem I could never have yielded to, if I had been weak enough to
form, an attachment. It is not in the great world that Lord Byron's
true character must be sought; but ask of those nearest to him--of the
unhappy whom he has consoled, of the poor whom he has blessed, of the
dependants to whom he is the best of masters. For his despondency I
fear I am but too answerable for the last two years."
"The last two years" included, as we have seen, the period during which
Byron was bombarding Hanson with perpetual and imperious demands for the
ready money without which he could not go abroad with Lady Oxford--the
period at which he told Moore that he was ready to "incorporate with any
decent woman"--and the period at which he wrote "The Bride of Abydos" in
order to "distract my thoughts from * * *" Miss Milbanke, that is to say,
exaggerated both her importance to Byron and her influence over him,
flattering herself that there would have been no "Byronism" but for her
coldness, and that the warmth of her affection, so long withheld, was the
one thing wanting to make glorious summer of the winter of Byron's
discontent.
It was not an unnatural hallucination. Young women of romantic disposition
are easily flattered into such beliefs, especially if the gates are
thronged with suitors. Having read of such situations in many novels, and
dreamed of them in many dreams, they live in expectation of the day when
life will be true to fiction and their dreams will be fulfilled. And
sometimes, of course, the dreams are fulfilled--sometimes, but not very
often, and hardly ever in the case of heroines who are, as Miss Milbanke
was, commonplace in spite of their intelligence, cold, obstinate,
unyielding, critical, vain, and inexperienced, quick to perceive slights,
and slow to forgive them.
At all events they were not, in her case, destined to be fulfilled; and
the initial improbability of their fulfilment may be inferred from a
confession which Hobhouse reports.
"Lord Byron," Hobhouse writes, "frankly confessed to his companion
that he was not in love with his intended bride; but at the same time
he said that he felt for her that regard which he believed was the
surest guarantee of matrimonial felicity."
No more than that. Byron was only marrying, Hobhouse assures us, from "a
love of change, and curiosity and a feeling of a sort of necessity of
doing such a thing once." So that the engagement may be said to have been
entered upon with a clash of conflicting expectations; and though tact
might have saved the adventurers from shipwreck, tact was precisely the
quality in which they were both most conspicuously deficient.
It was on the last day of September, 1814, that Hobhouse heard of the
engagement. On the first day of October he wrote his congratulations, and
on October 19, he was invited to act as groomsman. Some time in the same
month Byron paid his first visit to the Milbankes at Seaham. Thence he
went to Cambridge to vote in favour of the candidature of his friend Dr.
Clarke's candidature for the Professorship of Anatomy, and was applauded
by the undergraduates in the Senate House. "This distinction," Hobhouse
says, "to a literary character had never before been paid except in the
instance of Archdeacon Paley"--a curious partner in the poet's glory. A
month later Byron and Hobhouse set out together again for Seaham on what
Hobhouse calls "his matrimonial scheme."
This was the occasion on which Byron confided to Hobhouse that he was not
in love. A note in Hobhouse's Diary to the effect that "never was lover in
less haste" affords contemporary corroboration of the fact; and the Diary
continues to be picturesque, giving us Hobhouse's critical, but not
altogether unfavourable, impression of Miss Milbanke and her family:
"Miss Milbanke is rather dowdy-looking, and wears a long and high
dress, though she has excellent feet and ankles.... The lower part of
her face is bad, the upper, expressive but not handsome, yet she gains
by inspection.
"She heard Byron coming out of his room, ran to meet him, threw her
arms round his neck, and burst into tears. She did this _not before
us_.... Lady Milbanke was so much agitated that she had gone to her
room ... our delay the cause.... Indeed I looked foolish in finding
out an excuse for our want of expedition....
"Miss Milbanke, before us, was silent and modest, but very sensible
and quiet, and inspiring an interest which it is easy to mistake for
love. With me she was frank and open, without little airs and
affectations....
"Of my friend she seemed dotingly fond, gazing with delight on his
bold and animated face ... this regulated, however, by the most entire
decorum.
"Old Sir Ralph Milbanke is an honest, red-faced spirit, a little
prosy, but by no means devoid of humour.... My lady, who has been a
dasher in her day, and has ridden the grey mare, is pettish and
tiresome, but clever."
There is more; but that is the essence. The impression which disengages
itself is one of a well-bred but rather narrow provincialism. The
Milbankes are not exactly great people, but the country cousins of great
people--very decidedly their country cousins. The men are not quite men of
the world; the women are very far from being women of the world--which is
pretty much what one would expect in an age in which the country was so
much more remote from the town than it is at present. Miss Milbanke, in
particular, seems to strike the exact note of provincial correctitude
alike in her display of the emotion proper to the occasion and in her
concealment of it. Her correctitude was, no doubt, made still more correct
by an unemotional disposition.
During the ceremony, which took place in her mother's drawing-room, she
was very self-possessed--"firm as a rock," is Hobhouse's description of
her demeanour. Things were happening as she had meant them to happen--one
may almost say as she had contrived that they should happen. "I felt,"
says Hobhouse, "as if I had buried a friend"; but he nevertheless paid the
compliments which were due, and Miss Milbanke, now Lady Byron, said just
the right thing in reply to them:
"At a little before twelve," Hobhouse notes, "I handed Lady Byron
downstairs and into her carriage. When I wished her many years of
happiness, she said, 'If I am not happy it will be my own fault.'"
Nothing could have been more proper than that; for that is just how things
happen when the dreams come true. Such a saying sometimes is, and always
should be, the prelude to "they lived happily together ever afterwards";
and one can picture Lady Byron telling herself that things were happening,
and would continue to happen, just as in a story-book.
Only there are two kinds of story-books. There are the story-books which
are written for girls--and the others. This story was to be one of the
others. The husband's past and the wife's illusions were almost bound to
make it so--the more certainly because both husband and wife suffered from
the defects of their qualities; and the defects of Lady Byron's qualities
in particular were such as not only to make her helpless in the _rôle_
which developments were to assign to her, but also to compel her to
comport herself with something worse than a lack of dignity.
CHAPTER XVII
INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER
A thick accretion of legend has gathered round Byron's life alike as an
engaged and as a married man. Every biographer, whether friendly or
hostile, has added fresh anecdotes to the heap. Almost all the stories are
coloured by prejudice. Even when they seem to be derived from the same
source, they are often mutually contradictory; so that it is, as a rule, a
hopeless task to try to distinguish between fact and fiction, or do more
than disengage a general impression of discordant temperaments progressing
from incompatibility to open war.
Even the period of the engagement is reported not to have been of
unclouded happiness. A son of Sir Ralph Milbanke's Steward at Seaham has
furnished recollections to that effect. "While Byron was at Seaham," says
this witness, "he spent most of his time pistol-shooting in the
plantation"--a strangely moody occupation for an affianced man; and he
adds that, on the wedding morning, when all was prepared for the ceremony,
"Byron had to be sought for in the grounds where he was walking in his
usual surly mood." Mrs. Beecher Stowe tells us that Miss Milbanke,
observing that her lover did not rejoice sufficiently in his good
fortune, offered to release him from his promise--whereupon he "fainted
entirely away," and so convinced her, for the moment, of the sincerity of
his affection.
Similar stories, equally well attested and equally unconvincing, cluster
round the departure of the married couple for Halnaby where they spent
their honeymoon. Lady Byron told Lady Anne Barnard that the carriage had
no sooner driven away from the door of the mansion than her husband turned
upon her with "a malignant sneer" and derided her for cherishing the "wild
hope" of "reforming him," saying: "Many are the tears you will have to
shed ere that plan is accomplished. It is enough for me that you are my
wife for me to hate you." The Steward's son, giving an alternative version
of the story, declares that "insulting words" were spoken before leaving
the park--"after which he appeared to sit in moody silence, reading a book
for the rest of the journey." Byron's own account of the incident, as
given to Medwin, was as follows:
"I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out
of humour to find a lady's maid stuck between me and my bride. It was
rather too early to assume the husband; so I was forced to submit, but
it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a similar
situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the sulks."
These three stories, it is clear, cannot all be true; and none of them can
either be proved or disproved, though the last was contradicted by
Hobhouse who said that he had inspected the carriage and found no maid in
it. Similarly with the stories which follow. According to the Steward's
son, Sir Ralph Milbanke's tenants assembled to cheer Byron on his arrival
at Halnaby--but "of these he took not the slightest notice, but jumped out
of the carriage and walked away, leaving his bride to alight by herself."
There is also a story told by another authority, who cannot, however, have
been an eye-witness, to the effect that Byron, awaking from his slumbers
on his nuptial night, exclaimed, in his surprise at his strange
surroundings, that he supposed he was in Hell.
All these stories, of course, are exceedingly shocking, if true; but there
are no means of ascertaining whether they are true. Nothing can be
positively affirmed except that the beginnings were inauspicious, and must
have seemed the more inauspicious to Lady Byron because of that fond
belief of hers, that her rejection of Byron in 1812 had caused him two
years' mental agony, now at last to be happily removed by her
condescending tenderness. A vast amount of tact--a vast amount of
give-and-take--would have been needed to make a success of a marriage
concluded under that misapprehension; and Lord and Lady Byron were both of
an age at which tact is, as a rule, a virtue only known by name.
Of Byron's tact we have an example in the famous dialogue: "Do I
interrupt you, Byron?"... "Damnably." Of Lady Byron's tact we shall
discover an instance at the crisis of her married life. In the meantime we
must note that they made up their first quarrel--which may very well have
been less serious at the time than it appeared to be in retrospect--and,
at any rate, kept up appearances sufficiently well to deceive their
closest friends. From Halnaby they returned to Seaham, where nothing
happened except that Byron discovered his father-in-law to be a bore,
addicted to dreary political monologuising over wine and walnuts. They
next visited Mrs. Leigh at Six Mile Bottom, and then they proceeded to 13
Piccadilly Terrace--that unluckily numbered house, hired from the Duchess
of Devonshire, in which many catastrophes were to occur, and a distress
was presently to be levied for non-payment of the rent.
Mrs. Leigh, it will be observed, was pleasantly surprised to observe that
the marriage seemed to be turning out well. She had the more reason to be
surprised because she shared none of Lady Byron's illusions as to the part
which she had played, for the past two years, in Byron's emotional and
imaginative life. She was in her brother's confidence, and knew all about
Lady Caroline Lamb, all about Lady Oxford, and--more particularly--all
about Mary Chaworth. Consequently she had had her apprehensions, which she
confided to Byron's friend Hodgson. A few extracts from her letters to
Hodgson will bring this point out, and show us how the marriage looked
from her point of view. On February 15, 1815, she wrote:
"It appears to me that Lady Byron _sets about_ making him happy in
quite the right way. It is true I judge at a distance, and we
generally _hope_ as we _wish_; but I assure you I don't conclude
hastily on this subject, and will own to you, what I would not
scarcely to any other person, that I had _many fears_ and much anxiety
_founded upon many causes and circumstances_ of which I cannot
_write_. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to be realised."
On March 18, 1815: "Byron is looking remarkably well, and of Lady B. I
hardly know how to write, for I have a sad trick of being struck dumb
when I am most happy and pleased. The expectations I had formed could
not be _exceeded_, but at least they are fully answered.
"I think I never saw or heard of a more perfect being in mortal mould
than she appears to be, and scarcely dared flatter myself such a one
would fall to the lot of my dear B. He seems quite sensible of her
value."
On March 31, 1815: "Byron and Lady B. left me on Tuesday for
London.... The more I see of her the more I love and esteem her, and
feel how grateful I am, and ought to be, for the blessing of such a
wife for my dear, darling Byron."
On September 4, 1815: "My brother has just left me, having been here
since last Wednesday, when he arrived very unexpectedly. I never saw
him _so_ well, and he is in the best spirits."
This is evidence not extorted by questions but spontaneously volunteered.
If it proves nothing else, at least it proves that appearances were kept
up, and that Augusta was deceived. But appearances, none the less, gave a
false impression; and there were other friends, more keen sighted than
Augusta, who saw through them. Hobhouse, in particular, did so. He too had
had his anxieties, and had been watching; and the notes in his Diary--some
of them contemporaneous with, but others subsequent to, Augusta's
letters--are not unlike the rumblings of a coming thunderstorm.
On March 25, 1815: "I went to bed out of spirits from indeterminate
but chiefly low apprehensions about Byron."
On April 1, 1815: "He advises me 'not to marry,' though he has the
best of wives."
On April 2, 1815: "Lady Oxford walks about Naples with Byron's picture
on her girdle in front."
On July 31, 1815: "Byron is not more happy than before marriage. D.
Kinnaird is also melancholy. This is the state of man."
On August 4, 1815: "Lord Byron tells me he and she have begun a little
snubbing on money matters. 'Marry not,' says he."
On August 8, 1815: "Dined with Byron, &c. All grumbled at life."
On November 25, 1815: "Called on Byron. In that quarter things do not
go well. Strong advice against marriage. Talking of going abroad."
There is nothing specific there; and when we set out to look for something
specific, we only run up against gossip of doubtful authenticity. "Do I
interrupt you?"... "Damnably," may be assumed to be authentic since Byron
himself has admitted the repartee. It was rude and reprehensible, though
it was probably provoked. The charges which young Harness, now in Holy
Orders, heard preferred by some of Lady Byron's friends are rightly
described by him as "nonsensical"; but we may as well have them before us
in order to judge of the propriety of the epithet:
"The poor lady had never had a comfortable meal since their marriage.
Her husband had no fixed hour for breakfast, and was always too late
for dinner.
"At his express desire she had invited two elderly ladies to meet them
in her opera-box. Nothing could be more courteous than his manner to
them while they remained; but no sooner had they gone than he began to
annoy his wife by venting his ill-humour, in a strain of bitterest
satire, against the dress and manners of her friends."
"Poor Lady Byron was afraid of her life. Her husband slept with loaded
pistols by his bed-side, and a dagger under his pillow."
"Nonsensical" is decidedly the word for these allegations. The incidents,
even if true, could only be symptoms, not causes, of the disagreement.
Harness, perceiving that, seeks the true explanation of the estrangement
in the disposition of Lady Byron, whom he had known as a girl. She "gave
one the idea of being self-willed and self-opinionated." She "carried no
cheerfulness along with her." The majority of her acquaintances "looked
upon her as a reserved and frigid sort of being whom one would rather
cross the room to avoid than be brought into conversation with
unnecessarily." A common acquaintance remarked to Harness: "If Lady Byron
has a heart, it is deeper seated and harder to get at than anybody else's
heart whom I have ever known."
Et cetera. So far as we can judge Lady Byron by the letters in which she
subsequently announced, without formulating, her grievances, the verdict
seems a just one. She might be pictured, in the words of the author of
"Ionica" as one who
"_Smiles at all that's coarse and rash,
Yet wins the trophies of the fight,
Unscathed in honour's wreck and crash,
Heartless, yet always in the right._"
Or rather one begins so to picture her--and is even justified in so
picturing her at the beginning--though presently, when one sees how
unfairly she fought in the great fight which ensued, one changes one's
mind about her, withdraws such sympathy as one has allowed to go out to
her, and thinks of her husband when one comes to the final couplet of the
poem:
"_And I, dear passionate Teucer, dare
Go through the homeless world with you._"
Yet Lady Byron had her grievances, and though they were quite different
from those which Harness has reported, they were not light ones. Two
grievances in particular must have been very trying to the temper of a
young bride who had been an only and spoiled child. In the first place,
and almost at once, there was trouble about money. In the second place,
and very soon, there was trouble about "the women of the theatre."
Byron, at the time of his marriage, was heavily in debt. His one idea of
economy had always been to obtain credit instead of paying cash; and such
cash as he had the handling of quickly slipped through his fingers. He
never denied himself a luxury, and seldom refused a request for a loan. He
had helped Augusta; he had helped Hodgson; he had helped Coleridge. Now he
found his expenses increased out of all proportion to the increase of his
income; while his creditors, assuming that his wife had a fortune,
proceeded to press for the settlement of their accounts. Hence that
"snubbing on money matters" to which we have seen Hobhouse referring; and
the word "snubbing" may well have been a euphemism for more severe
remonstrance when executions began to be levied. There were no fewer than
ten executions in the house in the course of a few months; and one can
understand that the experience was unfavourable to the temper of a young
wife coming from a well-ordered home in which precise middle-class notions
on such subjects had prevailed.
The simultaneous trouble about women, of course, made matters worse.
Whether there was trouble about Mary Chaworth or not is uncertain; but, at
any rate, Lady Byron met her and appears to have felt the pangs of
jealousy. "Such a wicked looking cat I never saw. Somebody else looked
quite virtuous by the side of her," was her commentary to Augusta; and, if
she spoke of Mary Chaworth as a cat, we need not suppose her to have been
any more complimentary in her references to those actresses whose
acquaintance she knew her husband to be making.
He had become, at this time, together with Lord Essex, George Lamb,
Douglas Kinnaird, and Peter Moore, a member of the Sub-Committee of
Management of Drury Lane Theatre. It does not appear that the
Sub-Committee did a great deal except waste the time of the actual
managers; but it is not to be supposed that they were altogether
neglectful of the amenities of their position. They had "influence"; and
upon the men who have "influence" actresses never fail to smile. Some
actresses smiled upon Byron for that reason, and others smiled upon him
for his own sake. Some of them, it may be, drew the line at smiling; but
others, as certainly, did more than smile. Miss Jane Clairmont, in
particular--but we shall come to Miss Jane Clairmont presently.
How much Lady Byron knew, at the time, about these matters is doubtful.
She must have known a good deal, for actresses sometimes called at the
house; and any defects in her knowledge may be presumed to have been eked
out by conjecture. Knowledge, conjecture, and gossip, operating in
concert, cannot have failed to make her feel uncomfortable. In this
respect, as in others, things were not falling out as she had expected.
The fondly cherished belief that her love was the one thing needful to
Byron's happiness, and that he had moped for two years because she had
withheld it from him, was receiving every day a ruder shock.
The shocks were the more violent because Byron, in the midst of his
pecuniary embarrassments and theatrical philanderings, was attacked by a
disorder of the liver. No man is at his best when his liver is sluggish;
and Byron probably was at his worst--gloomy, contentious, and prone to
uncontrollable outbursts of passion. So there were scenes--the sort of
scenes that one would expect: Lady Byron, on the one hand, coldly and
reasonably reproachful--"always in the right," and most careful not to
lose her temper; Byron, on the other hand, talking to provoke her,
boasting of abandoned wickedness, falling into fits of rage, much as his
own mother had been wont to do when she rattled the fire-irons--throwing
his watch on the ground and smashing it to pieces with the poker.
Very likely he was angry with Lady Byron because he did not love
her--irritated beyond measure at every fresh revelation that she could
never be to him what Mary Chaworth might have been. The beginning of
unhappiness in marriage must often come like that. It is not unnatural,
though it is unreasonable, and not to be combated by reason. Lady Byron,
unhappily, had no other weapon than reason with which to combat it; and it
is quite likely that her very reasonableness made the trouble worse. It
did, at any rate, pass from bad to worse--and then from worse to
worst--during the critical days of her confinement, at the end of 1815.
Those were the circumstances which paved the way for open war and the
demand for judicial separation. Or, at all events, those were some of the
circumstances; for the story is long, and intricate, and involved, and
darkened with the clouds of controversy. Byron's version of it, it is
needless to say, is quite different from Lady Byron's. According to him
the causes of the separation were "too simple to be easily found out."
According to her, they included an enormity of which he dared not speak;
and the clash of these conflicting allegations constitutes what has been
called "the Byron mystery."
Perhaps it is not possible to solve the whole of that mystery even now.
New evidence, however, has lately been adduced, on the one hand in
Hobhouse's Diary and Narrative, and on the other hand from Lady Byron's
correspondence, printed by the late Earl of Lovelace in "Astarte." By
sifting it, we may at least contrive to come nearer to the truth--to put,
as it were, a ring fence round the mystery--to distinguish the assertions
which have been proved from the assertions which have been disproved, and
to reduce within narrow limits the fragment of the mystery which, until
more conclusive documents are produced, must still remain mysterious.
The late Earl of Lovelace, as is well-known, attempted to acquit his
grandmother of a charge of evil-speaking by convicting his grandfather of
a charge of unnatural vice. It will be necessary to consider whether he
has succeeded or failed in the attempt. The latter charge, but for his
revival of it, might have been waived aside as equally calumnious and
incredible. As it is, a biographer cannot discharge his task without
taking up the challenge. It shall be taken up with every possible
avoidance of unpleasant detail, but taken up it must be; and the most
convenient way to approach the subject will be first to tell the story as
it is presented by Hobhouse who represented Byron throughout the
negotiations.
CHAPTER XVIII
LADY BYRON'S DEMAND FOR A SEPARATION--RUMOURS THAT "GROSS CHARGES" MIGHT
BE BROUGHT, INVOLVING MRS. LEIGH
Hobhouse, as we have seen, had an early inkling of the trouble which was
to come; and it is not to be supposed that the brief entries in his Diary
chronicle the whole of his knowledge. He had observed, indeed--or so he
says--that it was "impossible for any couple to live in more apparent
harmony"; but he also had reason to believe that the appearances did not
reflect the realities with complete exactitude. He had heard Byron talk,
though "vaguely," of breaking up his establishment, of going abroad
without Lady Byron, of living alone in rooms; and he had noticed that
Byron's complaints of his poverty led up to disparaging generalisations
about marriage.
Speaking of his embarrassments, Byron had said that "no one could know
what he had gone through," but that he "should think lightly of them were
he not married." Marriage, he had added, "doubled all his misfortunes and
diminished all his comforts." He summed the matter up, with apparent
anxiety to do equal justice to Lady Byron's feelings and his own by
saying: "My wife is perfection itself--the best creature breathing; but
mind what I say--_don't marry_." Having received these confidences, and
knowing Byron well, Hobhouse must have been at least partially prepared
for the subsequent developments; but their suddenness nevertheless
surprised him, as they surprised everyone.
The crisis came shortly after Lady Byron's confinement, in the early days
of 1816. Augusta, Byron's cousin, Captain George Byron, and Mrs. Clermont,
a waiting woman who had been promoted to be Lady Byron's governess and
companion, were all in the house at the time. They had witnessed some of
the scenes of which we have spoken--scenes which appear to have included,
if not to have been provoked by, irritating references to "the women of
the theatre." Byron is said to have been aggressive in his allusions to
them; and there is no evidence that Lady Byron was conciliatory on the
subject. The state of his liver and of her general health would naturally
have tended to accentuate any differences that arose. Things came to such
a pass that, for a few days, they communicated in writing instead of by
word of mouth; and Byron sent a note to Lady Byron's room.
He spoke in this note of the necessity of breaking up his establishment--a
necessity of which, in view of the frequent invasions of the bailiffs, she
can scarcely have then heard for the first time. He asked her to fix a
date for accepting an invitation to stay with her mother at Kirkby
Mallory. He proposed that that date should be as early as was compatible
with her convenience, and added: "The child will, of course, accompany
you." Whereto Lady Byron replied, also in writing: "I shall obey your
wishes and fix the earliest day that circumstances will admit for leaving
London."
Neither letter is particularly amiable. On the other hand, neither letter
suggests that Lady Byron was leaving, or being asked to leave, as the
direct consequence of any specific quarrel. There was no question of a
separation--only of a visit to be paid; and the dread of more "men in
possession" sufficiently explains Byron's wish that it should be paid
without delay. Lady Byron would obviously be more comfortable at Kirkby
Mallory than in a house besieged or occupied by minions of the law. Her
husband would have time, while she was there, to turn round and reconsider
his position. The temporary estrangement--the interchange of heated
recriminations--did not make the execution of the plan any the less
desirable. On the contrary, it might afford opportunity for tempers to
cool and for absence to make the heart grow fonder.
It seemed, at first, as though Lady Byron saw the matter in that light.
She did not sail out of the house with indignation--she left it on
ostensibly cordial terms with everybody who remained in it. She wrote to
Byron in language which seemed to express fond affection, sending him news
of his child, and saying that she looked forward to seeing him at Kirkby.
One of the letters--there were two of them--began with the words "Dear
Duck," and was signed with Lady Byron's pet name "Pippin." That was in the
middle of January. There was an interval of a few days, and then it became
known that Lady Noel[8] and Mrs. Clermont were in London, "for the
purpose," as Hobhouse states, "of procuring means of providing a
separation."
Nothing, Hobhouse insists, had happened since Lady Byron's departure to
account for this sudden change of attitude. There had, in fact, hardly
been time for anything to happen. That intrigue with a "woman of the
theatre" which Cordy Jeaffreson believed to have been Lady Byron's
determining grievance did not begin until a later date. The one thing, in
short, which had happened was that Lady Byron--and Mrs. Clermont, who had
accompanied her--had talked. Byron's conduct had been painted by them in
lurid colours--the more lurid, no doubt, because they found listeners who
were at once astounded and sympathetic. Sir Ralph and Lady Noel had,
naturally, been indignant. Their daughter, they vowed, was not to be
treated in this way; and they were, no doubt, the more disposed to
indignation because they and Byron had not got on very well together.
Sir Ralph is commonly described in Byron's letters to his intimates as
prosy and a bore. "I can't stand Lady Noel," was the reason which he gave
Hobhouse for declining to visit her house. A very small spark, in such
circumstances, may kindle a fierce conflagration; and it appeared to do so
in this case. There was no manoeuvring for position, no beating about the
bush. Byron received no intimation, direct or indirect, of the plans which
were being laid for his confusion. What he did receive--on February 2--was
a stiffly worded ultimatum from his father-in-law.
The charges contained in the ultimatum were mostly vague; in so far as
they were precise, they were untrue. "Very recently," Sir Ralph began,
"circumstances have come to my knowledge"; the circumstances, so far as he
disclosed them, relating to Lady Byron's "dismissal" from Byron's house,
and "the treatment she experienced while in it." He went on to propose a
separation and to demand as early an answer as possible. He got his answer
the same day. It was to the effect that Lady Byron had not been
"dismissed" from Piccadilly Terrace, but had left London "by medical
advice," and it concluded: "Till I have her express sanction of your
proceedings, I shall take leave to doubt the propriety of your
interference."
Mrs. Leigh wrote simultaneously to Lady Byron to inquire whether the
proposal made by her father had her concurrence. The answer, dated
February 3, was that it had, but that Lady Byron, owing to her
"distressing situation" did not feel "capable of stating in a detailed
manner the reasons which will not only justify this measure, but compel
me to take it." She referred, however, to Byron's "avowed and
insurmountable aversion to the married state, and the desire and
determination he has expressed, ever since its commencement, to free
himself from that bondage, as finding it quite insupportable"; and she
added in a subsequent letter, written on the following day:
"I hope, my dear A., that you would on no account, withhold from your
brother the letter which I sent yesterday, in answer to yours, written
by his desire; particularly as one which I have received from himself
to-day renders it still more important that he should know the
contents of that addressed to you."
That was the stage which the discussion had reached when Hobhouse, calling
on Byron on February 5, heard what had happened and was taken into
council. The whole thing was a mystery to him, and a mystery on which
Byron could throw but little light. In the light of the few facts before
him, Lady Byron's conduct was absolutely unaccountable, inconsistent, and
incoherent. The transition from the "Dearest Duck" letter to the "avowed
and insurmountable aversion to the married state" letter seemed
inexplicably abrupt; and, indeed, it seems so still, though later
disclosures enable us, in some measure, to trace its history; the facts
now known, but not then known either to Byron or to his advisers, being
as follows:
1. Lady Byron had assumed that Byron was mad, and must be humoured
tactfully. The "Dearest Duck" letter had been the manifestation of her
tact.
2. Lady Byron had secretly instructed doctors to inquire into, and
report upon, the state of Byron's mind. They had reported that he was
perfectly sane; and their report had, in Lady Byron's opinion, removed
all shadow of excuse for his behaviour, and decided her to leave him.
Hence Lady Noel's journey to London, to consult lawyers.
3. Dr. Lushington, the lawyer consulted, had advised Lady Noel that,
while the circumstances laid before him "were such as justified a
separation," they were "not such as to render such a measure
indispensable," and that he "deemed a reconciliation practicable."
4. Lady Byron had persisted, for reasons which she did not yet state,
either to her family or to her legal advisers, in her refusal to
return. Hence Sir Ralph Noel's ultimatum.
These facts, which gave Lady Byron's conduct a certain superficial
coherence, were gradually elicited. For the moment, however, the only fact
which Hobhouse had before him was the ultimatum and Lady Byron's
endorsement of it. Of Lady Byron's reasons he knew nothing; and he had no
grounds for suspecting any other motives than the word "tantrums" would
cover. He proceeded, as did all Byron's supporters, on the assumption that
the word "tantrums" did, in fact, cover them; and a fusillade of letters
ensued. One cannot quote them all, but their contents can easily be summed
up. From Byron's side there issued appeals for reconciliation, for
explanations, for specific charges, for personal interviews; from Lady
Byron's side there came refusals either to give reasons or to parley, and
reiterated statements that her mind was unalterably made up.
"I must decline your visit and all discussion," was what Lady Byron wrote
to Hobhouse on February 7; and on the same day she wrote to Byron himself:
"I have finally determined on the measure of a separation.... Every
expression of feeling, sincerely as it might be made, would be misplaced."
The letter apparently crossed one from Byron to Sir Ralph Noel, in which
he said that his house was still open to Lady Byron, that he must not
debase himself to "implore as a suppliant the restoration of a reluctant
wife," but that it was her duty to return, and that he knew of no reason
why she should not do so. On the following day Byron addressed a further
appeal to Lady Byron herself: "Will you see me--when and where you
please--in whose presence you please?" and, almost as he was writing, he
received another communication from Sir Ralph Noel, threatening legal
proceedings "until a final separation is effected."
February 13 brought the letter in which Lady Byron stated that she had
excused Byron's conduct in the belief that he was mad, but that she could
not excuse it now that she had received assurance of his sanity. She
added: "I have consistently fulfilled my duty as your wife; it was too
dear to be resigned till it was hopeless. Now my resolution cannot be
changed." Byron rejoined on February 15: "I have invited your return; it
has been refused. I have requested to know with what I am charged; it is
refused."
He had, in fact, made, and was still to make, attempts, through several
channels, to pin Lady Byron and her supporters to a specific allegation.
Hodgson had been appealed to by Mrs. Leigh to come and help. He came, and,
on the strength of the information supplied to him, wrote to Lady Byron.
Two of her letters and one of his are published in his life by his son,
the Reverend James T. Hodgson. Hers may be analysed as a very thinly
veiled threat to bring mysterious and abominable charges unless she got
her way. There is an air about the letters of conscious virtue and of
consideration for the feelings of others, but the threat is unmistakably
contained in them. "He _does_ know--too well--what he affects to inquire,"
is one sentence; and another is: "The circumstances, which are of too
convincing a nature, shall not be generally known whilst Lord B. allows me
to spare him."
Hanson, the lawyer had, in the meantime, been sent to call on Sir Ralph
Noel. He had asked for explanations, and been refused any. He had also
met Lushington who had, by this time, been definitely retained by Lady
Byron, and addressed some inquiries to him. "Oh, we are not going to let
you into the _forte_ of our case," had been Dr. Lushington's reply.
It was, no doubt, a reply in strict conformity with his instructions.
Lushington, as we know from a published letter from him to Lady Byron,
was, at this date, personally in favour of an attempt at reconciliation.
On the other hand, as is equally clear from the letters quoted in
preceding paragraphs, Lady Byron had announced her intention of going into
Court unless she could get her separation without doing so. Whether she
had, at this date, any case--any case, that is to say, which a lawyer
could take into Court with any confidence of winning it--may be
questioned. The weaker her case, of course, the less likely her counsel
would be to reveal the nakedness of the land prematurely by talking about
it. Professional etiquette and zeal for the interests intrusted to him
account quite adequately for his reticence; and there is no other
influence to be drawn from it.
A little later, at an uncertain date towards the end of February,
Lushington, as his letter to Lady Byron sets forth, received a visit from
Lady Byron, had "additional information" imparted to him, changed his
mind, and said that, if a reconciliation were still contemplated, or
should thereafter be proposed, he, at any rate, should decline to render
any help in bringing it about. The original "Byron mystery" was: What was
the nature of that "additional information" which so suddenly altered
Lushington's attitude towards the case? That mystery has, as we shall see
in a moment, been solved by Lord Lovelace. The questions left unsolved
relate, not to the nature of the information but to its accuracy. Byron,
Hobhouse, and Hodgson, however, were unable to dispute its accuracy
because they were left uninformed as to its nature, and could only guess
the charges to be met.
The awkwardness of the situation is obvious. On the one hand, Byron could
not be expected to desire, for his own sake, the society of a wife who
wrote him such letters as he was now receiving from Lady Byron--to
separate from her would, at any rate, be the least uncomfortable of the
courses open to him. On the other hand, he could not afford to let it be
said that he had consented to a separation under the threat of gross, but
unspecified, accusations. The charges might be specified afterwards,
whether by Lady Byron herself or by the irresponsible voice of gossip, and
he would be held to have pleaded guilty to them.
That, as Byron's friends impressed upon him, could not be allowed. It
could the less be allowed because rumour was already busy, and charges of
a very monstrous and malignant character were being whispered. The name of
Mrs. Leigh was being mixed up in the matter, and there was some reason to
suppose that the stories implicating her emanated from Lady Byron; for
Lady Byron, according to Hobhouse, had intimated to Mrs. Leigh that "she
would be one of her evidences against her brother." That might mean much,
or might mean little; but it meant enough, at any rate, to make it
imperative for Byron to show fight until the air was cleared. So his
friends urged, and he agreed with them, and waited for the next step to be
taken by the other side.
What the other side did, in these circumstances--we are still following
Hobhouse's account--was simultaneously to appeal for pity, to bluff, and
to spy out the land. They "talked of the cruelty of dragging" Lady Byron
into a public Court. They sent Mrs. Clermont to Captain Byron to try to
induce him to dissuade Byron from fighting. They threatened that, if he
did fight, they would carry the case from Court to Court, and bury him
alive under a heap of costs. But all this without effect. Sir Ralph Noel
wrote to Hanson to inquire whether Byron had "come to any determination"
on the proposal to separate. The reply was to the effect that "his
Lordship cannot accede."
At the end of February, that is to say, Byron still meant fighting. He
said that, if Lady Byron did not proceed against him, he should proceed
against her, and commence an action for the restitution of conjugal
rights. His friends approved of his determination; but, at the same time,
desiring to know what sort of a case would have to be met, they begged
Byron to be quite candid with them and inform them, not, of course, of the
nature of Lady Byron's charges, of which he had not himself been informed,
but of any good grounds of complaint which he knew himself to have given
her.
CHAPTER XIX
"GROSS CHARGES" DISAVOWED BY LADY BYRON--SEPARATION AGREED TO
How far Byron was candid with his friends it is, of course, impossible to
say. We know neither what he told them nor what he left untold. All that
is on record is their opinion, reproduced by Hobhouse, that "the whole
charge against him would amount merely to such offences as are more often
committed than complained of, and, however they might be regretted as
subversive of matrimonial felicity, would not render him amenable to the
laws of any court, whether of justice or of equity."
That was either at the end of February or the beginning of March. Early in
the latter month Byron and his friends opened further negotiations. Byron
once more asked his wife to see him, and she replied: "I regret the
necessity of declining an interview under existing circumstances." Then
Lady Melbourne urged her to return to her husband, but only elicited an
expression of wonder "that Lord Byron had not more regard for his
reputation than to think of coming before the public." Then Lord Holland,
who had already offered his services as a negotiator, submitted to Byron
the proposed terms of a deed of separation; but Byron rejected the terms,
describing the proposal as "a kind of appeal to the supposed mercenary
feelings of the person to whom it was made."
There next followed interviews between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and
between Lady Byron and Captain Byron. To these intermediaries Lady Byron
represented that "something had passed which she had as yet told to no
one, and which nothing but the absolute necessity of justifying herself in
Court should wring from her." Whereto Byron replied that "it was
absolutely false that he had been guilty of any enormity--that nothing
could or would be proved by anybody against him, and that he was prepared
for anything that could be said in any Court." He allowed Hobhouse to
offer on his behalf "any guarantees short of separation"; but he made it
quite clear that he was not frightened, and would not yield to threats.
Upon that Lady Byron changed her tone. Her next letter did not so much
claim a separation as beg for one. "After your repeated assertions," she
wrote, "that, when convinced my conduct has not been influenced by others,
you should not oppose my wishes, I am yet disposed to hope these
assertions will be realised." There, at last, was an appeal to which it
was possible for Byron to respond--on terms; not on Lady Byron's terms, of
course--but on his own. He had begun the negotiations by declining to
"implore as a suppliant the return of a reluctant wife." Nothing had
happened in the course of the negotiations to persuade him that he
would live more happily with Lady Byron than without her. Indeed, it was
now more evident than ever that to separate was the only way of making the
best of a bad job.
[Illustration: _Lady Byron._]
At the same time it was equally evident that he must stand out for terms.
Mud had been thrown; and while there had been no specific charges, there
had been dark hints of monstrous crimes. It was necessary, therefore, to
insist that Lady Byron should give "a positive disavowal of all the
grosser charges" which had been suggested without being positively
preferred; and Hobhouse proceeded to continue the negotiations on those
lines.
There were, in fact, two "gross" charges to be faced. One of these
concerned Mrs. Leigh, and the other did not. On the nature of the latter
charge it is quite superfluous to speculate. Whatever it may have been, no
evidence was offered in support of it at the time, and no evidence bearing
on it has since been brought to light. It was not maintained; it was not
revived; it has been forgotten. The rules of controversy not only warrant
us in passing it over, but bid us do so. The Byron mystery, wherever it
may be, is not there. Though all the "gross" charges had, at the moment,
to be dealt with collectively, the only charge which mattered was the
charge in which Mrs. Leigh was involved.
Lady Byron, when challenged with the charges, at first equivocated. She
was quite willing, she said, to declare that the rumours indicated "had
not emanated from her or from her family." That, naturally, was not good
enough for Byron and his friends. What they required was that Lady Byron
should state "not only that the rumours did not originate with her or her
family, but that the charges which they involved made no part of her
charges against Lord Byron." A statement to that effect was drawn up for
her to sign, and she signed it. The signed statement, witnessed by Byron's
cousin, Wilmot Horton, was shown to Hobhouse, and was left in Wilmot
Horton's hands until the settlement should be completed. The Byron
mystery, such as it is, or was, only exists--or existed--because Byron and
Wilmot Horton fell out, and the latter, withdrawing from the negotiations,
mislaid or lost the document.
That Lady Byron did sign the document, however, and that its contents were
as stated, no doubt whatever can be entertained. Hobhouse's subsequent
evidence on the subject is supported by the correspondence which passed at
the time. He referred to the document, with full particularity, in a
letter which he wrote Lady Byron, and which has been published; and Lady
Byron, in her answer, did not deny either that she had signed, or that she
was bound by its contents. The trouble arose because, after having signed
it, she behaved as if she had not done so, and, by her conduct, gave the
lie to her pledged word that "neither of the specified charges would have
formed part of her allegations if she had come into Court."
This trouble, however, was not immediate. Lady Byron did not begin to
talk till some time afterwards: and at first she only talked to people who
had sense enough to keep her secret, if not to rate it at its true value.
Not until some years after her death did a foolish woman in whom she had
confided publish her story to the world in a book filled from cover to
cover with gross and even ludicrous inaccuracies. When that happened, the
old scandal which the book revived was mistaken for a new scandal freshly
brought to light; and there was a great outcry about "shocking
revelations" and much angry beating of the air by violent
controversialists on both sides. All that it is necessary to say on that
branch of the subject shall be said in a moment. What we have to note now
is that Byron did not, and could not, foresee that that particular battle
would rage over his reputation.
He admitted to his friends, and he had previously admitted to Lady Byron,
that "he had been guilty of infidelity with one female." He was under the
impression that she had given him "a plenary pardon"; but the offence
nevertheless gave her a moral--if not also a legal--right to her
separation, if she insisted on it. Of the "gross" charges he only knew
that they had never been formally pressed, and that they had been formally
repudiated. So far as they were concerned, therefore, his honour was
perfectly clear; and there remained no reason why he should not append his
signature to the proposed deed of separation, as soon as its exact terms
were agreed upon. The details still awaiting adjustment were mainly of
the financial order. They were adjusted, and then Byron signed.
It may be that he signed the more readily because the rumours had been
tracked to another source, and disavowed there also. Lady Caroline Lamb
has often been accused of putting them in circulation. She heard, at the
time, that she had been so accused, and wrote to Byron to repudiate the
charge. "They tell me," she wrote, "that you have accused me of having
spread injurious reports against you. Had you the heart to say this? I do
not greatly believe it." Very possibly the receipt of that letter
strengthened Byron's resolution to sign. At all events he did sign, and
then a storm burst about his head:
"I need not tell you of the obloquy and opprobrium that were cast upon
my name when our separation was made public. I once made a list from
the Journals of the day of the different worthies, ancient and modern,
to whom I was compared. I remember a few: Nero, Apicius, Epicurus,
Caligula, Heliogabalus, Henry the Eighth, and lastly the ----. All my
former friends, even my cousin George Byron, who had been brought up
with me, and whom I loved as a brother, took my wife's part. He
followed the stream when it was strongest against me, and can never
expect anything from me: he shall never touch a sixpence of mine. I
was looked upon as the worst of husbands, the most abandoned and
wicked of men, and my wife as a suffering angel--an incarnation of
all the virtues and perfections of the sex. I was abused in the public
prints, made the common talk of private companies, hissed as I went to
the House of Lords, insulted in the streets, afraid to go to the
theatre, whence the unfortunate Mrs. Mardyn had been driven with
insult. The _Examiner_ was the only paper that dared say a word in my
defence, and Lady Jersey the only person in the fashionable world that
did not look upon me as a monster."
"I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private
rancour; my name which had been a knightly or a noble one since my
fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was
tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and
murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was
unfit for me."
The former of these passages is from Medwin's "Conversations"; the latter
is written by Byron's own hand. There is very little to be added to the
picture which they draw. Byron discovered that, for a man of his
notoriety, there was no such thing as private life. His business was
assumed to be everybody's business. In his case, just as in the Dreyfus
case, at a later date, all the world took a side, and those who knew least
of the rights of the case were the most vehement in their indignation.
Broadly speaking one may say that his friends were for him but his
acquaintances were against him, and the mob took the part of his
acquaintances. Hobhouse, Hodgson, Moore, Rogers, Leigh Hunt, and Scrope
Davies never faltered in their allegiance. On the other hand, many social
leaders cut him; the journalists showered abuse on him as spitefully as if
they felt that they had "failed in literature" through his fault; the
religious seized the opportunity to punish him for what they considered
the immoral tone of his writings; the pit and gallery at Drury Lane
classed him with the villain of the melodrama who presumes to lay his hand
upon a woman otherwise than in the way of kindness. It was a combination
as irresistible as it was unforeseen, and he had to yield to it.
Lady Jersey, as he told Medwin, did her best for him. He and Mrs. Leigh
were both present at a reception specially given in his honour--a
demonstration that one social leader at least attached no importance and
gave no credence to the scandals which besmeared his name. Miss Mercer,
afterwards Madame de Flahault and, in her own right, Lady Keith, made a
point of greeting him with frank cordiality as if nothing had happened.
Probably the specific scandal which Lady Byron had been compelled to
disavow was never taken very seriously outside Lady Byron's immediate
circle. Certainly it was not the scandal which aroused the indignation of
the multitude. For them, the _causa teterrima belli_ was Mrs. Mardyn, the
actress, whom Byron hardly knew by sight; and the gravamen of their charge
against him was that he had treated a woman badly.
That was enough for them; and their indignation was too much for him. Now
that the deed of separation had been signed, it was too late for him to
fight. The "grosser charges" against him were charges of which he could
not prove publication--charges which had been withdrawn. Sneers and
innuendoes did not, any more than hoots and hisses, furnish him with any
definite allegation on which he could join issue. The whispered charge
involving his sister was not one which he could formally contradict unless
it were formally preferred. _Qui s'excuse s'accuse_ would have been quoted
against him if he had done so; and Mrs. Leigh's good name as well as his
own would have been at the mercy of the mud-slingers. All things
considered, it seemed that the best course open to him was to travel, and
let the hostile rumours die away, instead of keeping them alive by
argument.
He went, and they died away and were forgotten. We will follow him to the
continent presently, and see how nearly persecution drove him to
degradation, and how, under the influence of the blow which threatened to
crush him, his genius took fresh flights, more hardy than of old, and more
sublime. But first we must turn back, and face the scandal in the form in
which Mrs. Beecher Stowe and Lord Lovelace have successively given it two
fresh leases of life, and see whether it is not possible to blow it into
the air so effectively that no admirer of Byron's genius need ever feel
uneasy about it again.
CHAPTER XX
REVIVAL OF THE BYRON SCANDAL BY MRS. BEECHER STOWE AND THE LATE LORD
LOVELACE
The Byron scandal slowly fell asleep, and was allowed to slumber for about
half a century. Even the publication of Moore's Life did not awaken it.
People took sides, indeed, as they always do, some throwing the blame on
the husband, and others on the wife; but the view that, whoever was to
blame, the causes of the separation were "too simple to be easily found
out" prevailed.
Forces, however, making for the revival of the scandal were nevertheless
at work. Byron smarted under social ostracism and resented it. Though Lady
Byron had never made any formal charge to which he could reply, but had,
on the contrary, formally retracted all "gross" charges, he continued to
be embittered by suggestions of mysterious iniquities, and his anger found
expression alike in his letters and in his poems. To a certain extent he
defended himself by taking the offensive. He caused notes on his case to
be privately distributed. He wrote "at" Lady Byron, in the Fourth Canto of
"Childe Harold," in "Don Juan," and elsewhere. A good deal of his
correspondence, printed by Moore, expressed his opinion of her in terms
very far from flattering.
Under these combined influences public opinion veered round--the more
readily because Byron was held to have made ample atonement for his
faults, whatever they might have been, by sacrificing his life in the
cause of Greek independence. Lady Byron was now thought, not indeed to
have erred in any technical sense, but to have made an undue fuss about
very little, and to have been most unwomanly in her frigid consciousness
of rectitude. The world, in short, was more certain now that she had been
"heartless" than that she had been "always in the right."
Naturally, her temptation to "answer back" was strong. She could not very
well answer back by preferring any monstrous indictment in public. That
course was not only to be avoided in her daughter's interest, but might
also have involved her in an action for defamation of character on the
part of Mrs. Leigh--an action which she could not have met with any
adequate defence. Of that risk, indeed, she had been warned by her friend
Colonel Doyle, in a letter printed in "Astarte" to which it will presently
be necessary to return--a letter in which she had been urgently
recommended to "act as if a time might possibly arise when it might be
necessary for you to justify yourself." But if she could not answer back
in public, at least she could answer back in private.
She did so. That is to say, she talked--mostly to sympathetic women who
were more or less discreet, but also, in her later years to Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who did not so much as know what discretion was. The story
of which Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had already received hints from the
women whose discretion was comparative was ultimately told to her, whose
indiscretion was absolute, by Lady Byron herself. She remained as discreet
as the rest--that is to say, more or less discreet--during Lady Byron's
life, and for some time afterwards. But when the Countess Guiccioli wrote
a book about Byron in which Lady Byron was disparaged, she could restrain
herself no longer. In support of Lady Byron's story she had no evidence
except Lady Byron's word. She did not know--and she did not trouble to
inquire--what evidence against it might exist. She did not pause to ask
herself whether her own recollection might not be at fault concerning a
story which she had heard thirteen years before. It was enough for her,
apparently, that Lady Byron was a religious woman, and that Byron, on his
own showing, had lived "a man's life." That sufficed, in her view,
wherever there was a conflict of statements, to demonstrate that Byron was
a liar, and that Lady Byron spoke the truth. So she plunged into the fray,
and, with a great flourish of trumpets, published Lady Byron's story in
"Macmillan's Magazine." When the "Quarterly Review" had, in so far as it
is ever possible to prove a negative, disproved the story, she repeated it
with embellishments in a book entitled: "Lady Byron Vindicated: A History
of the Byron Controversy from its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time."
The essence of Mrs. Stowe's story is contained in this report of Lady
Byron's conversation:
"There was something awful to me in the intensity of repressed emotion
which she showed as she proceeded. The great fact upon which all
turned was stated in words that were unmistakable:
"'He was guilty of incest with his sister.'"
There is the charge. Turning over the pages in quest of the evidence in
support of it, we find this:
"She said that one night, in her presence, he treated his sister with
a liberty which both shocked and astonished her. Seeing her amazement
and alarm he came up to her, and said, in a sneering tone, 'I suppose
you perceive _you_ are not wanted here. Go to your own room, and leave
us alone. We can amuse ourselves better without you.'
"She said, 'I went to my room trembling. I went down on my knees and
prayed to my heavenly Father to have mercy on them. I thought: What
shall I do?'
"I remember, after this, a pause in the conversation, during which she
seemed struggling with thoughts and emotions; and, for my part, I was
unable to utter a word or ask a question."
No more than that. This _ex parte_ interpretation of a foolish conjugal
quarrel of forty years before, admittedly untested by any demand for
particulars, was absolutely the sole piece of testimony which Mrs. Stowe
adduced when she set out to blast Byron's reputation. The rest of the book
consists of pious and sentimental out-pourings, vulgar abuse of Byron, and
equally vulgar eulogy of his wife; the two passages cited being the only
passages material to the issue. There was nothing in writing for her to
quote--no case which a respectable lawyer would have taken into Court--no
case that would not have been laughed out of Court within five minutes if
it had ever got so far.
The tribunal of public opinion did, in fact, laugh the case out of Court
at the time. It was "snowed under," partly by laughter, and partly by
indignation and the British feeling in favour of fair play; and it
remained so buried for nearly forty years. Biographers could afford to
scout it as "monstrous" without troubling to confute it. Sir Leslie
Stephen, in the "Dictionary of National Biography," treated it as an
hallucination to which Lady Byron had fallen a victim through brooding
over her grievances in solitude.
One would be glad if one could still take that tone towards it; but Lord
Lovelace has made it impossible to do so. Mrs. Stowe, as a mischief-making
meddler, interfering with matters which did not concern her, and about
which she was obviously very ill informed, had not even a _primâ facie_
title to be taken seriously. The case of Lord Lovelace was different. He
was Byron's grandson and the custodian of Lady Byron's strong-box. He
affected not merely to assert but to argue. He produced from the
strong-box documents which he was pleased to call proofs. A good many
people, not having seen them, probably still believe that they are proofs.
They cannot be waived on one side like Mrs. Stowe's unsupported
allegations, but must be dealt with; and the whole question of the charge
which they are alleged to substantiate must, of course, be dealt with
simultaneously.
And first, as the documents laid before us are miscellaneous, we must
distinguish between those of them which count and those which do not
count. Some of the contents of the strong-box, it seems, are merely
"statements" in Lady Byron's handwriting. These are only referred to by
Lord Lovelace, but not printed. Not having been produced, they cannot be
criticised; but there are, nevertheless, two comments which it is
legitimate to make. In the first place, an _ex parte_ statement, though
admissible in evidence for what it may be worth, is not the same thing as
proof. In the second place, if the statements had been of a nature to
strengthen the case which Lord Lovelace was trying to make out, instead of
merely embellishing it, they would not have been held back. Their absence
from the _dossier_ need not, therefore, embarrass us; and we need, in
fact, be the less embarrassed by it because it was already perfectly well
known that Lady Byron was in the habit of writing out statements, and had
shown them to impartial persons who had taken the measure of their value.
That fact is set forth in the Rev. Frederick Arnold's Life of Robertson
of Brighton, who, as is well known, was, for a considerable time, Lady
Byron's religious adviser.
"A remarkable incident," writes Mr. Arnold, "may be mentioned in
illustration of the relations with Lord Byron. Lady Byron had
accumulated a great mass of documentary evidence, papers and letters,
which were supposed to constitute a case completely exculpatory of
herself and condemnatory of Byron. She placed all this printed matter
in the hands of a well-known individual, who was then resident at
Brighton, and afterwards removed into the country. This gentleman went
carefully through the papers, and was utterly astonished at the utter
want of criminatory matter against Byron. He was not indifferent to
the _éclat_ or emolument of editing such memoirs. But he felt that
this was a brief which he was unable to hold, and accordingly returned
all the papers to Lady Byron."
That comment on the "statements," significant in itself, is doubly
significant when taken in conjunction with Lord Lovelace's suppression of
them; and we may fairly consider the case without further reference to
them, and without an apprehension that a surprise will be sprung from that
source to upset the conclusions at which we arrive. Lord Lovelace did not
rest his case on them, but on quite other documents, which we will proceed
to examine after first saying the few words which need to be said in order
to clear the air.
One point, indeed, Lord Lovelace has made successfully. He has proved that
the gross and mysterious charge which Lady Byron preferred (or rather
hinted at while refusing to prefer it) at the time of the separation was,
in fact, identical with the charge formulated in Mrs. Stowe's book. A
contemporary memorandum to that effect, in Lushington's handwriting,
signed by Lady Byron, and witnessed by Lushington, Wilmot Horton, and
Colonel Doyle, is printed in "Astarte." To that extent the so-called Byron
mystery is now solved, once and for all. The statement set forth in that
memorandum, and afterwards repeated to Mrs. Stowe, was the statement on
the strength of which Lushington declared, as has already been mentioned,
that he could not be a party to any attempt to effect a reconciliation.
So far so good. The probability of these facts could have been inferred
from Hobhouse's narrative; their certainty is now established. We now know
of what Byron was accused--behind his back; we also know of what Mrs.
Leigh was accused--behind her back. But--and the "but" is most
important--the memorandum contains this remarkable sentence:
"It will be observed that this Paper does not contain nor pretend to
contain any of the grounds which gave rise to the suspicion which has
existed and still continues to exist in Lady B.'s mind."
Which is to say that Lady Byron, on her own showing, and that of her
legal advisers, was acting not on evidence but on "suspicion." In this
document there is not even so much evidence as was set before Mrs. Stowe,
or any suggestion that any evidence worthy of the name exists. The quest
for proof must be pursued elsewhere.
But where?
Lord Lovelace has not shown us. The document in which it is expressly set
forth that none of the statements contained in it are of the nature of
proofs is the only contemporary document which he cites; for the scrap of
a letter which he quotes from Mrs. George Lamb only proves, if indeed it
proves anything, that Mrs. Lamb had heard what Lady Byron said. Further on
in his book, indeed, Lord Lovelace represents that Mrs. Leigh
subsequently, under pressure, confessed her guilt to Lady Byron; but
concerning that representation two things shall be demonstrated in the
next chapter.
In the first place Mrs. Leigh did not confess--the alleged confession
having no bearing whatsoever on the matter which we are now considering.
In the second place the inherent probabilities of the case and the
circumstantial evidence which illuminates it are such that, even if Mrs.
Leigh had confessed, it would be impossible to believe her on her oath.
CHAPTER XXI
INHERENT IMPROBABILITY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST AUGUSTA LEIGH--THE
ALLEGATION THAT SHE "CONFESSED"--THE PROOF THAT SHE DID NOTHING OF THE
KIND
First as to the inherent probabilities:
The accusation, as elaborated by Lord Lovelace, is, it must be observed,
that Byron had yielded to an unnatural passion for his sister at a period
anterior to his marriage--the period covered by the Journal from which we
have quoted, and by those mysteriously morbid and gloomy poems of which
"The Bride of Abydos" and "Lara" are the most remarkable. This passion,
according to Lord Lovelace, was the cause of the spiritual "crisis"
through which poems and Journal alike prove him to have passed. When Byron
writes that "The Bride" was "written to drive my thoughts from the
recollection of * * *," Lord Lovelace interprets him to mean that it was
written to drive his thoughts from the recollection of Mrs. Leigh. Hers,
he invites us to believe, was the "dear sacred name" which was to "rest
ever unrevealed."
That theory is not only nonsense, but arrant nonsense--obviously so to
readers who are familiar with Byron's letters, and demonstrably so to
those who are not. All that can be said in favour of the view is that
some of the passages in some of the poems are so obscure that they can be
tortured into accord with the most preposterous hypothesis. On the other
hand, while there is no direct evidence on the subject at all, there is
conclusive circumstantial evidence which effectually disposes of Lord
Lovelace's calumnious assertion--evidence, happily, so simple that one
almost can sum it up in a sentence.
Throughout the whole of the "crisis" in question Byron was in
correspondence with Mrs. Leigh; and a great deal of the correspondence has
been published. The letters are letters in which Byron takes his sister
into his confidence. We find him writing to her, first about his "affairs"
with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and then about his desolating
passion for another lady whom we have seen reason to identify with Mary
Chaworth. Nor does it matter, for the purposes of the present argument,
whether that identification is correct or not. The solid fact, in any
case, remains that, at the very time when Lord Lovelace represents Byron
as engaged in an intrigue with Augusta Leigh, he was, in fact, writing to
her to apologise for his "long silence," and attributing that silence to
trouble in connection with another lady: "It is not Lady Caroline, nor
Lady Oxford; _but perhaps you may guess_, and, if you do, do not tell."
There are other letters to the same effect, but that letter should
suffice. No sane man will believe Byron to have been devoured by a guilty
passion for the woman to whom he confided secrets of that sort; and, if
there were any disposition to entertain the belief were still harboured,
it could hardly fail to be expelled by an examination of the letters which
passed between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and between Mrs. Leigh and
Francis Hodgson.
Mrs. Leigh had been with Lady Byron during her confinement. There had been
no quarrel between them, and no suspicion or suggestion of a quarrel. When
Lady Byron left Piccadilly Terrace for Kirkby Mallory, Mrs. Leigh
continued, with her knowledge, and without any hint of an objection, to
stay in her brother's house. Even when Lady Byron communicated her
decision not to return to her husband, she expressed neither surprise at
Mrs. Leigh's remaining there, nor desire for her departure. On the
contrary, at the very time when she was insisting upon separation, and
hinting at charges too awful to be preferred unless the particulars were
dragged from her, she was corresponding with Mrs. Leigh, not merely on
terms of ordinary politeness, but on terms of confidential intimacy and
cordial affection--addressing her as "My dearest A.," "My dearest Sis,"
"My dearest Gus," &c., &c.
A long series of these letters is printed in Mr. Murray's latest edition
of Byron's Works. Readers who desire full particulars must be referred to
them. A few sentences only need be given here, as an indication of their
tone:
"If all the world had told me you were doing me an injury, I _ought
not_ to have believed it. My chief feeling, therefore, in relation to
you and myself must be that I _have_ wronged you, and that you have
never wronged me!"
"I know you feel for me as I do for you--and perhaps I am better
understood than I think. You have been ever since I knew you my best
comforter, and will so remain, unless you grow tired of the office,
which may well be."
"The present sufferings of all _may_ yet be repaid in blessings. Don't
despair absolutely, dearest; and leave me but enough of your interest
to afford you any consolation by partaking that sorrow which I am most
unhappy to cause you thus unintentionally.... Heaven knows you have
considered me more than one in a thousand would have done."
"I am anxious to acquit you of all misrepresentation, and myself of
having supposed that you had misrepresented.... I cannot give you pain
without feeling yet more myself."
"My dearest A., it is my great comfort that you are in Piccadilly."
Some of these letters were written at a time when Lady Byron believed her
husband to be mad. All of them were written at a time when she was
accusing him of improper relations with her correspondent--as is
established beyond dispute by her signed statement, published in
"Astarte." The excerpt printed last was written at the time when she
professed to entertain both beliefs. It amounts, when analysed, to an
expression of gratification that her sister-in-law, to whom she claims to
be deeply attached, is in a position to continue incestuous and adulterous
intercourse with a raving maniac. It is incredible, of course, that she
can either have felt, or intended to express, any such gratification at
any such state of things. The letter is explicable on one hypothesis, and
one only: that Lady Byron herself did not really believe the story which
she had told to her advisers.
We have already seen--from the wording of Lady Byron's statement and from
her correspondence with Colonel Doyle--that she had no proofs of her
story. We have also seen that, when Byron's friends tried to pin her to
the story, she disavowed it. The conclusion that she did not even believe
it at the time when she told it comes as a fitting climax; and it needs
but little conjecture or imagination to divine her motives and give
coherence to the narrative of her proceedings.
She had come to hate her husband, and had resolved to separate from him at
all costs. Such hatreds are sometimes conceived by women without adequate
cause, just before and just after pregnancy. One suspects that
pathological explanation, though one does not know enough of the facts to
insist upon it. The hatred, at any rate, was there, impelling Lady Byron
to seek a separation, and she proceeded to take advice. Probably she was
advised that her case was too weak to be taken into Court with
confidence; and she certainly was advised that reconciliation was
preferable to separation. The only way of securing the firm support of her
own friends was to lay fresh facts before them.
That is the stage of the proceedings at which we are told that fresh facts
came to her knowledge. But the alleged facts were only treated as facts
for the purposes of argument. They were scandals--the scandals implicating
Mrs. Leigh, and launched, as is believed, by Lady Caroline Lamb, who
subsequently disavowed them as explicitly as Lady Byron herself. In order
to make sure of her separation Lady Byron adopted those scandals and laid
them before Lushington. Lushington may or may not have believed them. So
long, however, as he remained in charge of the case he was bound to behave
as if he did; and the nature of the charges was such that, even if he only
believed them in the sense in which a barrister is required to believe the
contents of his brief, he was obviously bound to take the line that they
precluded all idea of a reconciliation.
He did take that line; and Lady Byron got her separation. She was so eager
to get it that she first made abominable charges against her husband in
order to win the sympathy of her own friends, and then withdrew them in
order to disarm Byron's friends. All this without informing Mrs. Leigh
that her name was being mixed up in the matter, and without withdrawing
from Mrs. Leigh's society. Ultimately, no doubt, she did come to believe
the story which she had first circulated and then disavowed. It is hardly
to be questioned that she believed it at the time when she told it to Mrs.
Beecher Stowe. But she clearly did not believe it at the time when she
made use of it; and one can only attribute her final belief in it to a
kind of auto-suggestion, induced by dwelling on her grievances, and akin
to the process by which George IV. persuaded himself that he had taken
part in the Battle of Waterloo.
That is the most plausible supposition as to the motives inspiring Lady
Byron's conduct; and there is nothing except the motives themselves which
stands in need of explanation. From Lushington's action no inference
whatever is to be drawn, for it was the only action which the rules of
professional etiquette left open to him; and the Byron question is not: On
what evidence did Lady Byron act as she did? It is merely: Why did Lady
Byron act as she did without any evidence at all? It is so small a
question that, having offered a tentative solution, we may fairly leave it
and glance at Mrs. Leigh's correspondence with Hodgson.
Hodgson, as has already been mentioned was brought in by Mrs. Leigh as a
peacemaker. The letters which she wrote to him before, during, and after
the quarrel appear in the Life of Hodgson by his son, published in 1878.
They are too long to be given at length; but their bearing on the issue,
which no one who takes the trouble to read them will dispute, must be
briefly stated.
In the first place they, most obviously, are not the letters of a guilty
woman, or of a woman who feels herself in any way personally implicated in
the dispute which she seeks to compose. Every line in them demonstrates,
not merely that the writer is conscious of rectitude, but also that the
writer is ignorant that she herself is, or can be, the object of sinister
suspicion. They are just the flurried letters of a simple body who feels
that circumstances have laid upon her shoulders a heavier load of
responsibility than they can bear, but would rather be helped to bear the
burden than run away from it; and it is a fair summary of them to say that
they exonerate Byron by exonerating the alleged accomplice in his crime.
In the second place the letters show Mrs. Leigh, ignorant, indeed, of the
specific enormities with which Byron is charged, but well aware of certain
circumstances which had made Byron's marriage a dubious experiment. In the
earlier letters, indeed those circumstances are only hinted at obscurely,
but in the later letters the meaning of the hints is made quite clear. For
instance:
"I assure you I don't conclude hastily on this subject, and will own
to you, what I would not scarcely to any other person that I HAD _many
fears_ and much anxiety founded upon many causes and circumstances of
which I cannot _write_. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to
be realised."
That was written during the honeymoon. In letters written shortly after
the honeymoon there are similar vague expressions of anxiety. It is not
until we come to the letters written after the separation that we begin to
get sight of the particulars; but then we light upon this significant
passage:
"I am afraid to open my lips, though all I say to _you_ I know is
secure from misinterpretation. On the opinions expressed by Mr. M. I
am _not surprised_. I have seen letters written _to him_ which could
not but give rise to such, or confirm them. If I may give you _mine_,
it is that _in his own mind_ there _were_ and _are_ recollections,
fatal to his peace, and which would have prevented his being happy
with any woman whose excellence equalled or approached that of Lady
B., from the consciousness of being unworthy of it. Nothing could or
can remedy this fatal cause but the consolations to be derived from
religion, of which, alas! dear Mr. H., our beloved B. is, I fear,
destitute."
The idea that the fatal recollections here deplored are recollections of
guilty acts in which the writer of the letter was a partner would be too
preposterous to be treated with respect even if we did not know what the
nature of those recollections was; but, as a matter of fact, a later
passage in the same letter supplies the information:
"I am glad you were rather agreeably surprised in the poems.... Of
course _you_ know to whom the 'Dream' alludes, Mrs. C----."
And there, of course, the truth is out. Mrs. C---- is, and can be no one
else than, Mary Chaworth. The "causes too simple to be found out" had to
do with Byron's imperishable passion for the lady whom we have seen his
wife calling a "cat." Byron could not live happily with Lady Byron because
he could not forget Mary Chaworth--and Lady Byron knew it. Consequently
she set her heart upon obtaining a separation, and, in order to make sure
of that separation, "put up" the story, suggested by Lady Caroline Lamb's
poisonous tongue. The whole business is as simple as all that; and the
subject might properly be dropped at that point if it were not for Lord
Lovelace's assertion that papers in his hands demonstrated that Mrs. Leigh
had "confessed."
But the so-called confession of Augusta Leigh is like the so-called
confession of Captain Dreyfus. We are told that it exists; and when our
curiosity has been thus aroused we are told that it is not worth while to
produce it. Augusta, says Lord Lovelace, "admitted everything in her
letters of June, July, and August, 1816"; and then he goes on to say: "It
is unnecessary to produce them here, as their contents are confirmed and
made clear by the correspondence of 1819 in another chapter." But when we
turn to the correspondence of 1819, we find that no confession is
contained in them. The most that one can say is that, the language of the
letters being sometimes enigmatic, and the subjects to which they relate
being uncertain, one or two passages in them might conceivably be read as
referring to a confession, if one knew that a confession had been made.
Even on that hypothesis, however, they might just as easily be read as
referring to something else; and the real clue to their meaning may,
almost certainly, be found in a letter which Lord Lovelace prints in the
chapter entitled "Some Correspondence of Augusta Byron."
The letter[9] in question is a love letter. It begins "My dearest Love"
and ends "Ever Dearest." Lord Lovelace prints it as addressed by Lord
Byron to Mrs. Leigh in May 1819. It is a letter, however, in which both
the signature and the address are erased; but though there is no great
reason for doubting that Byron was the writer, there is no reason whatever
for believing that Mrs. Leigh was the recipient. Indeed, one has only to
place it side by side with the letters which we actually know Byron to
have written to Mrs. Leigh a little before May 1819, and a little
afterwards, in order to be positive that she was not; and one has only to
remember that Byron still sometimes wrote to Mary Chaworth, and that his
correspondence passed through his sister's hands, in order to satisfy
oneself whose letter it was that Lord Lovelace found among Lord Byron's
papers. So that our conclusion must be:
1. That Lord Lovelace's most substantial piece of evidence against
Mrs. Leigh is a letter[9] which though it passed through her hands,
was really written to Mary Chaworth.
2. That the alleged confession does not exist--for if it did exist,
Lord Lovelace would have printed it.
And we may go further, and say, with confidence, not only that the alleged
confession does not exist at the present time, but that it never did
exist; for even that conclusion follows irresistibly from the known
circumstances of the final meeting between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, at
Reigate, in the presence of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, in 1851.
They had remained friends until 1830, and had then quarrelled, not about
Byron, but about the appointment of a new trustee under a settlement.
After that, they had ceased to see each other; and the Reigate interview,
of which Robertson drew up a memorandum, was avowedly and admittedly
arranged because Lady Byron desired, and expected, to receive a confession
before a witness of unimpeachable integrity. Nothing is more obvious than
that Lady Byron would have had no need to solicit a verbal confession in
1851 if she had succeeded in extracting a written confession in 1816; and
it is common ground that, in 1851, Mrs. Leigh not only confessed nothing,
but denied that she had anything to confess.
The whole story of the confession, therefore, vanishes like smoke; and one
is free, at last, to quit this painful part of the subject. It was
necessary to dwell on it carefully and at length on account of the
sophistical cobwebs spun round it by Lord Lovelace's awkward hands and
because, while justice injoined the vindication of Lord Byron, his
biographer could not let any prudish scruples or false delicacy withhold
him from the task of definitely clearing the memory of Byron's sister from
the shameful aspersions cast upon it, by Byron's grandson. But one,
nevertheless, gets away from it with relief, and returns with a sense of
recovered freedom to the facts of Byron's career at the time when the
storm broke about his head and drove him from the country.
CHAPTER XXII
BYRON'S DEPARTURE FOR THE CONTINENT--HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH JANE CLAIRMONT
Macaulay has described, in that picturesque style of his, how, just as
Byron "woke up one morning and found himself famous," so the British
public woke up one morning and found itself virtuous, with the result that
Byron was hooted and hounded out of England. The picture, like all
Macaulay's pictures, was overdrawn and over-coloured. The life of the
country, and even of the capital, went on pretty much as usual in spite of
Byron's dissensions with his wife; and Byron himself kept up appearances
fairly well, going to the theatre, entertaining Leigh Hunt, Kinnaird, and
other friends at dinner, and corresponding with Murray about the
publication of his poems. But, nevertheless, many circumstances combined
to make him feel uncomfortable.
Invitations ceased to be showered upon him; and "gross charges" continued
to be whispered in spite of Lady Byron's disavowal. The grounds of the
separation not being known, every one was free to conjecture his own
solution of the mystery. There seemed little doubt, at any rate, that
Byron had forsaken his lawful wife's society for that of the nymphs of
Drury Lane; and it was quite certain that he had failed to pay the
Duchess of Devonshire her rent. The only possible reply to these
allegations was that they were no part of the business of the people who
made such a fuss about them. The fuss being made, the most reasonable
course was to go abroad until the hubbub ceased.
It was no case, as Byron's enemies have said, of running away to avoid an
investigation into his conduct--investigation had been challenged, and all
the grave charges had been withdrawn. They had, indeed, by a breach of
faith, been secretly kept alive; but they had not reappeared in such shape
and circumstances that action could be taken on them; and Byron could not
be expected to formulate them himself, merely for the purpose of denying
them. His threat, a little later, to appeal to the Courts for an
injunction to restrain Lady Byron from taking his daughter out of England
as he had heard that she proposed to do, amply showed that he had no fear
of any shameful disclosures; but he had Mrs. Leigh's reputation as well as
his own to think of; and it was better for her sake as well as his that he
should desist from bandying words with her calumniators. Moreover it was
not only his calumniators who were making things unpleasant for him. His
creditors were also joining in the hue and cry and multiplying his motives
for retiring; so he resolved to go, attended by three servants and the
Italian physician, Polidori.
Rogers paid him a farewell visit on April 22; and Mr. and Mrs. Kinnaird
called the same evening, bringing, as Hobhouse tells us, "a cake and two
bottles of champagne." On the following morning the party were up at six
and off at half-past nine for Dover; Hobhouse riding with Polidori in
Scrope Davies' carriage, and Byron, with Scrope Davies, in his own new
travelling coach, modelled on that of Napoleon, containing a bed, a
library, and a dinner-service, specially built for him at a cost of £500.
A crowd gathered to watch the departure--a crowd which Hobhouse feared
might prove dangerous, but which, in fact, was only inquisitive. The
bailiffs arrived ten minutes afterwards and "seized everything," with
expressions of regret that they had not been in time to seize the coach as
well. Even cage-birds and a squirrel were taken away by them.
This news having been brought by Fletcher, the valet, who followed the
party, the coach was hustled on board the packet to be safe--a most wise
precaution seeing that there was a day's delay before it started; and
Hobhouse continues:
"April 25. Up at eight, breakfasted; all on board except the company.
The captain said he could not wait, and Byron would not get up a
moment sooner. Even the serenity of Scrope was disturbed.... The
bustle kept Byron in spirits, but he looked affected when the packet
glided off.... The dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it to me.
I gazed until I could not distinguish him any longer. God bless him
for a gallant spirit and a kind one!"
And then:
"Went to London.... Told there was a row expected at the theatre,
Douglas K. having received fifteen anonymous letters stating that Mrs.
Mardyn would be hissed on Byron's account."
This gives us, of course, the point of view of the populace--or perhaps
one should say of the middle classes. They, it is evident, knew nothing of
any specially gross or unspeakable charges against Byron, but were
satisfied to turn the hose of virtuous indignation on him because, instead
of managing Drury Lane in the sole interest of dramatic art, he had
availed himself of opportunities and yielded to temptations. And so no
doubt he had, though not exactly in such circumstances as the populace
supposed or in connection with the particular lady whose guilt the
populace had hastily assumed.
The popular indictment, indeed, included at least three glaring errors of
fact. In the first place the partner of Byron's latest passion (if passion
be the word) was not Mrs. Mardyn, but Miss Jane Clairmont. In the second
place his relations with Miss Clairmont had nothing whatever to do with
his separation from Lady Byron, because he did not make Miss Clairmont's
acquaintance until after Lady Byron had left him. In the third place it
was not Byron who pursued Miss Clairmont with his attentions, but Miss
Clairmont who threw herself at Byron's head.
Jane Clairmont was, as is well known, sister by affinity to Mary Godwin
who was then living with Shelley and was afterwards married to him. She
had accompanied Shelley and Mary on their first trip to Switzerland in
1814, and had subsequently stayed with them in various lodgings. In the
impending summer she was to go to Switzerland with them again, and Byron
was to meet her there, whether accidentally or on purpose. In the early
biographies, indeed, the meeting figures as accidental; but the later
biographers knew better, and the complete story can be pieced together
from a bundle of letters included in the Murray MSS., and the statement
which Miss Clairmont herself made in her old age to Mr. William Graham,
who travelled all the way to Florence to see her, and, after her death,
reported her conversations in the _Nineteenth Century_.
"When I was a very young girl," Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, "Byron was
the rage." She spoke of the "troubling morbid obsession" which he
exercised "over the youth of England of both sexes," and insisted that the
girls in particular "made simple idiots of themselves about him"; and then
she went on to describe how one girl did so:
"In the days when Byron was manager of Drury Lane Theatre I bethought
myself that I would go on to the stage. Our means were very narrow,
and it was necessary for me to do something, and this seemed to suit
me better than anything else; in any case it was the only form of
occupation congenial to my girlish love of glitter and excitement....
I called, then, on Byron in his capacity of manager, and he promised
to do what he could to help me as regards the stage. The result you
know. I am too old now to play with any mock repentance. I was young,
and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent.... His beauty
was as haunting as his fame, and he was all-powerful in the direction
in which my ambition turned. It seems to me almost needless to say
that the attentions of a man like this, with all London at his feet,
very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and
when you recollect that I was brought up to consider marriage not only
as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry
made necessary, you will scarcely wonder at the results, which you
know."
That is the story as Miss Clairmont remembered it, or as she wished
posterity to believe it. She also seems to have been fully persuaded in
her own mind that Shelley had recommended her to apply to Byron, and that
it was about her that Byron and Lady Byron fell out; but the letters
published by Mr. Murray show all this to be a tissue of absurd
inexactitudes. What actually happened was that Miss Clairmont wrote to
Byron under the pseudonym of "E Trefusis," beginning "An utter stranger
takes the liberty of addressing you," and proceeding to say: "It may seem
a strange assertion, but it is not the less true that I place my
happiness in your hands."
There is no reference there, it will be remarked, to any desire on Miss
Clairmont's part to adopt the theatrical profession. The few references to
such a desire which do occur later in the correspondence are of such a
nature as to show that Miss Clairmont did not entertain it seriously,
consisting mainly of objections to Byron's proposal that she should
discuss the matter with Mr. Kinnaird instead of him. Miss Clairmont, in
short, made it abundantly clear that she was in love, not with the
theatre, but with Byron; and the more evasive Byron showed himself, the
more ardently and impulsively did she advance. We gather from her letters,
indeed, that most of those letters were left unanswered, that Byron very
frequently was "not at home" to her, and that, when she was at last
admitted, she did not find him alone.
Most women would have been discouraged by such a series of repulses; but
Miss Clairmont was not. In response to a communication in which Byron had
begged her to "write short," she wrote: "I do not expect you to love me; I
am not worthy of your love." But she begged him, if he could not love, at
least to let himself be loved--to suffer her to demonstrate that she, on
her part, could "love gently and with affection"; and thus she paved the
way to a practical proposal:
"Have you, then," (she asked) "any objection to the following plan? On
Thursday Evening we may go out of town together by some stage of mail
about the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and
unknown; we can return early the following morning. I have arranged
everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited.
Pray do so with your people."
Even to that appeal Byron seems to have turned a deaf ear. One infers as
much from the fact that other appeals followed it: "Do not delay our
meeting after Saturday--I cannot endure the suspense," &c. After that,
however, and apparently quite soon after it, followed the capitulation;
and for the sequel we will turn again to Mr. Graham's report of Miss
Clairmont's confessions:
"He was making his final arrangements for leaving England, when I told
him of the project the Shelleys and I had formed of the journey to
Geneva. He at once suggested that we should all meet at Geneva, and
delightedly fell in with my proposal to accompany me one day when I
had arranged to visit the Shelleys at Marlow,[10] where they were then
stopping, and arrange matters. We started early one morning, and we
arrived at Marlow about the mid-day dinner-hour.... Byron refreshed
himself with a huge mug of beer.... A few minutes afterwards in came
Shelley and Mary. It was such a merry party that we made at lunch in
the inn parlour: Byron, despite his misfortunes, was in the spirits
of a boy at leaving England, and Shelley was overjoyed at meeting his
idolised poet, who had actually come all the way from London to see
him."
Such are the facts, so far as they are ascertainable, concerning the
origin of this curious _liaison_. It is a story which begins, and goes on
for some time, though it does not conclude, like the story of Joseph and
Potiphar's wife; and Miss Clairmont recalls how exultantly she proclaimed
her triumph. "Percy! Mary! What do you think? The great Lord Byron loves
me!" she exclaimed, bursting in upon her friends; and she adds that
Shelley regarded the attachment as right and natural and proper, and a
proof that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
He may have done so, for he was a dreamer, cradled in illusions,
unfettered by codes, always ready to look upon life as a fairy-tale that
was turning out to be true. Whether he did so or not, it seems at any rate
pretty clear that he was in Miss Clairmont's confidence, knew for what
reason Byron wished to meet him at Geneva, and acquiesced in the proposal.
But it is equally certain that he was not in Byron's confidence, and had
no suspicion of the spirit in which Byron had entered into the intrigue.
For Byron was not in love with Miss Clairmont, and never had been in love
with her, and never would be. In so far as he loved at all, he still loved
Mary Chaworth, to whom his heart always returned at every crisis of
unhappiness. There was no question of any renewal of the old passionate
relations; but she consented to see him once more before he left England.
"When we two parted in silence and tears" seems to belong to this moment
of his life--the moment at which Miss Clairmont first persuaded herself,
and then persuaded Shelley, that she was enthroned for ever in the
author's heart. That, still, was his one real sentimental hold on life.
Nothing else mattered; and the coquetries and audacities of this child of
seventeen mattered less than most things.
But a man must live; a man must divert himself. Most especially must a man
do so when, as Byron expressed it, his household gods lay shivered around
him--when his home was broken up and his child was taken away--when
rumours as intangible as abominable were afloat to his dishonour--when the
society of which he had been the bright particular star was turning its
back on him. Even the love, or what passed for such, of a stage-struck
girl of seventeen, could be welcome in such a case, and it would not be
difficult to give something which could pass for love in return for it.
That was what happened--and that was all that happened. Miss Clairmont
told Mr. Graham, in so many words, that she never loved Byron, but was
only "dazzled" by him. It is written in Byron's letters--from which there
shall be quotations in due course--and it is amply demonstrated by his
conduct, that he never loved Miss Clairmont, but only accepted favours
which she pressed upon him, and suffered her to help him to live at a
time when life was difficult.
The credit of having done that for him, however, should be freely given to
her. The appointment which she made with him at Geneva touched his flight
from England with romance. His reception by the generality of English
residents on the Continent was very, very doubtful. It would have been
painful to him to travel across Europe, defying opinion in solitude; but
he and Shelley and Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont could defy it in company
and laugh; and it was with this confident assurance in his mind that, as
Hobhouse writes, "the dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it" when
the Ostend packet glided out of Dover harbour.
CHAPTER XXIII
LIFE AT GENEVA--THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT
"From Brussels," as Moore magniloquently puts it, "the noble traveller
pursued his course along the Rhine." At Geneva he joined Shelley and his
party who had taken the shorter route across France; and it would seem
that he felt the need of all the moral support which their companionship
could give him.
Concerning the nature of his reception in Switzerland, indeed, there is a
good deal of conflicting testimony; but the balance of the evidence points
to its having been unfavourable. His own statement is that he "retired
entirely from society," with the exception of "some occasional intercourse
with Coppet at the wish of Madame de Staël"; but there are indications
that the retirement was not voluntary, and that, even at Coppet, his
welcome was something less than enthusiastic. On the former point we may
quote the letters of Lady Westmorland, just published by Lady Rose
Weigall:
"Lord Byron has been very coldly received here both by the natives and
by the English. No one visited him, though there is much curiosity
about him. He has been twice to Coppet."
Only twice, be it observed; and on one of the two occasions, one of Madame
de Staël's guests, Mrs. Hervey the novelist--a mature woman novelist of
sixty-five virtuous summers--fainted, according to one account, and
"nearly fainted," according to another, at the sudden appearance of the
Man of Sin, though, when she came to, she was ashamed of herself, and
conversed with him. Probably he called again; and not all the Coppet
house-party shared Mrs. Hervey's consternation at his visits. Lady
Westmorland did not for one, but commented on his "sweetness and sadness,
melancholy and depression," adding: "If he was all that he tries to seem
now he would really be very fascinating." On the other hand, however,
Madame de Staël's son-in-law, the Duc de Broglie, summed him up unkindly
and almost scornfully, declaring him "a boastful pretender in the matter
of vice," protesting that "his talk was heavy and tiresome," and that "he
did not manoeuvre his lame legs with the same ease and nonchalance as M.
de Talleyrand," and concluding:
"Madame de Staël, who helped all her friends to make the best of
themselves, did what she could to make him cut a dignified figure
without success; and when the first moment of curiosity had passed,
his society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him."
Which clearly indicates, in spite of the offensive priggishness of the
witness, that the tide of hostile opinion was, indeed, flowing too
strongly for even Madame de Staël to stem it.
She did her best, however; for she was no prude, but a woman with a great
heart, who had herself sought happiness in marriage, and failed to find it
there, and had openly done things for which, if she had been an
Englishwoman, Mrs. Grundy, instead of lionising, would have turned and
rent her. She went further, and proposed to write to Lady Byron and try to
arrange terms of peace; and Byron thanked her, and let her do so.
Not, of course, that he had the least desire to return to Lady Byron's
society. He was presently to thunder at her as his "moral Clytemnestra";
and Cordy Jeaffreson's suggestion that his irrepressible rhetoric was
"only the superficial ferment covering the depths of his affection for
her," and that "the woman at whom he railed so insanely was the woman who
shared with his child the last tender emotions of his unruly heart" is as
absurd a suggestion as ever a biographer put forth. Hobhouse has told us
that Byron never was in love with Lady Byron; and, after what we have seen
of Lady Byron's conduct and correspondence, it is hard to believe that any
man would have been in love with her after living with her for a
twelvemonth. Moreover, we know from "The Dream" where Byron's heart was at
this time, as always, and we know from his own, as well as from Miss
Clairmont's confessions, with how little regard for Lady Byron's feelings
he was just then diverting himself in the Genevan suburbs; and we may
fairly conclude that what he desired was not to return to her, but merely
to be set right with the world by a nominal reconciliation, which would
still leave him free to live apart from her.
He did not get what he wanted, and Lady Byron was quite within her rights
in withholding it. He had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a false
position, and had no claim upon her to help him to manoeuvre himself out
of it; while she, on her part, was much too high principled to strain a
point in favour of a returning prodigal--especially if, as is probable,
information had reached her as to his proceedings in his exile. So she
rejected his overtures in that cold, judicial, high-minded way of hers;
and Byron did not repeat them, but made it clear that he had meant nothing
by them, seeing that--
His reason is in "The Dream" which he wrote in July 1816. It was another
of his bursts of candour, telling the world (and Lady Byron) yet again how
he loved Mary Chaworth, and always had loved her, and always would, and
how, even on his wedding day, the memory of her had come between him and
his bride:
"_A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was returned--I saw him stand
Before an Altar--with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight of his boyhood:--as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude: and then--
As in that hour--a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced,--and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been--
But the old mansion and the accustomed hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour
And her who was his destiny, came back
And thrust themselves between him and the light._"
That was his Parthian shaft; and Cordy Jeaffreson's view of "The Dream" as
"a lovely and elaborate falsehood, written to persuade all mankind that he
never loved the woman whose heart he was yearning to recover" is much too
preposterous to be admitted. Mary Chaworth's husband knew that it was no
figment. He recognised the reference to a certain "peculiar diadem of
trees" on his estate, and gave orders that those trees should be cut down.
Lady Byron had no such remedy open to her; but she knew what was meant and
wrapped herself up in her virtue; while Byron, on his part, turned to the
diversions which were to help him to live in the face of the world's
contumely.
Alike for him and for Shelley and the two ladies who attended him there
was a good deal of that contumely as long as they remained in the Hotel
d'Angleterre; and it may almost be said that they invited it by making
themselves conspicuous. In Shelley's relations with Miss Godwin and Miss
Clairmont there was at least the appearance of promiscuity--an appearance
on which it did not take gossip long to base positive asseveration.[11]
Byron, already an object of curiosity on account of his supposed misdeeds,
had made himself conspicuous by his coach, and his retinue, and his manner
of travelling _en seigneur_. So that the other boarders stared when he
arrived, and stared still more when they saw him fraternising with his
brother poet and the ladies, not only wondering what the eccentric party
would be up to next, but keeping close watch on their comings and goings,
following them to the lake-side when they went out boating, awaiting them
on the lake-side when they landed on their return, lining up to inspect
them as often as carriages were brought to the door to take them for a
drive.
They did not like it, and moved into villas on the other side of the
Rhone, only to discover that the Hotel d'Angleterre overlooked them, and
that its obliging landlord had set up a large telescope so that his
visitors might survey their proceedings the more commodiously. This
obliged them to move again--Byron to the Villa Diodati, and Shelley to
the Maison Chapuis or Campagne Mont Allègre--and there at last they were
able, as the party of the Libertins in the Geneva of the Reformation put
it, to "live as they chose without reference to the preachers."
To much that they did there the preachers, even those of Calvin's time,
could have taken no exception. They talked--the sort of talk that would
have been high over the heads of their censors of the d'Angleterre; they
rowed on the lake, and sang in their boat in the moonlight; they read
poetry, and wrote it. Shelley pressed Byron to read Wordsworth; and he did
so, with results which are apparent in the Third Canto of "Childe Harold,"
where we find the Wordsworthian conception of the unity of man with Nature
reproduced and spoiled, as Wordsworth most emphatically insisted, in the
reproduction. There was a week of rain during which the friends decided to
fleet the time by writing ghost stories, and Mary Godwin wrote
"Frankenstein." There was also a circular tour of the lake, undertaken
without the ladies, in the course of which Shelley had a narrow escape
from drowning near Saint Gingolph. These things were a part, and not the
least important part, of the diversions which helped Byron to defy the
slanderers whom he could not answer. So was his short trip to the Oberland
with Hobhouse. And, finally, meaning so little to him that one naturally
keeps it to the end and adds it as a detail, there was the "affair" with
Miss Jane Clairmont.
On this branch of the subject he wrote to Mrs. Leigh, who had heard
exaggerated rumours:
"As to all these 'mistresses,' Lord help me--I have had but one. Now
don't scold; but what could I do?--a foolish girl, in spite of all I
could say or do, would come after me, or rather went before--for I
found her here--and I have had all the plague possible to persuade her
to go back again; but at last she went. Now, dearest, I do most truly
tell thee that I could not help this, that I did all I could to
prevent it, and have at last put an end to it. I was not in love, nor
have any love left for any; but I could not exactly play the Stoic
with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise
me. Besides, I had been regaled of late with so many 'two courses and
a _desert_' (Alas!) of aversion, that I was fain to take a little love
(if pressed particularly) by way of novelty."
The love had been pressed, as we have seen, and as Miss Clairmont, in her
age, admitted, very particularly indeed. She had dreamt, she admits--and
she would have us think that Shelley and Mary Godwin expected--that her
alliance with "the great Lord Byron" was to be permanent; and this though
she declares, elsewhere in her confessions, that she did not really love
him, but was only dazzled by him, and that her heart, in truth, was
Shelley's.
It was an ambitious dream; and it would be easy to make a list of reasons
why it was impossible that it should come true. The mood in which she
found Byron was only one of them. The defects and limitations of her own
qualities furnish others. She was a tradesman's daughter, and, though
well-educated, not without vulgarity; pretentious, but superficial;
stage-struck, a romp, and a mimic. If she ever mimicked Byron--if, in
particular, she ever mimicked his lameness--a good deal would be
explained.
One does not know whether she did or not. What one does know is that he
shook her off rather roughly, and, never having loved her, presently
conceived a dislike for her; and that though she bore him a child--the
little Allegra, so named after her birthplace, who only lived to be five
years of age, and now lies buried at Harrow. To Allegra, indeed, Byron was
good and kind--he looked forward, he told Moore and others, to the time
when she would be a support to the loneliness of his old age; but to
Allegra's mother he would have nothing more to say. How she hunted him
down, and how she and the Countess Guiccioli made each other
jealous--these are matters into which it is unnecessary to enter here. The
conclusions which Miss Clairmont drew, as she told Mr. Graham, was that
Byron's attitude towards women was that of a Sultan towards the ladies of
his harem. No doubt it was so in her case--and through her fault; for her
plight was very much like that of the worshipper of Juggernaut who should
prostrate himself before the oncoming car and then complain because the
wheels pass over him.
Probably, if she had been less pressing, or less clinging, he would have
been more grateful; for there assuredly was cause for gratitude even
though there was no room for love. Vulgar, feather-headed, stage-struck
little thing that she was, Jane Clairmont, by throwing herself at Byron's
head, and telling him, without waiting to be asked, that she, at least,
would count the world well lost for him--and still more perhaps by
bringing him into relation with the Shelleys--had rendered him real help
in the second desperate crisis of his life. One may repeat, indeed, that
she helped him to live through that dark period; and if she knew that, or
guessed it, she may well have felt aggrieved that his return for her
passion was so inadequate.
But he could not help it. His heart was out of his keeping, and he could
not give what he did not possess. A "passade" was all that he was capable
of just then; but that this "passade" did really help him to feel his feet
again in stormy waters, and bring him back once more to cheerfulness and
self-respect, is amply proved, first by the change of tone which appears
in his more intimate writings, and then by the new, and worse, way of life
into which we see him falling after the curtain has been rung down on the
episode.
Shelley departed, taking Miss Clairmont and her sister with him, sorely,
as there is reason to believe, against the former's wish, towards the end
of August; the honeymoon, such as it was, having lasted about three
months. Towards the end of the time, visitors began to arrive--"Monk"
Lewis, and "Conversation" Sharp, and Scrope Davies, and Hobhouse--but most
particularly Hobhouse who wrote Mrs. Leigh a reassuring letter to the
effect that her brother was "living with the strictest attention to
decorum, and free from all offence, either to God or man or woman," having
given up brandy and late hours and "quarts of magnesia" and "deluges of
soda-water," and appearing to be "as happy as it is consistent for a man
of honour and common feeling to be after the occurrence of a calamity
involving a charge, whether just or unjust, against his honour and his
feeling."
That was written on September 9; and it approximated to the truth. Having
despatched his report, Hobhouse took Byron for the tour already referred
to--over the Col de Jaman, down the Simmenthal to Thun, up the Lake of
Thun to Interlaken, and thence to Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, Brienz, and
back by way of Berne, Fribourg, and Yverdon. Byron kept a journal of the
journey for his sister to peruse. In the main it is merely a record,
admirably written, of things seen; but now and again the diarist speaks
out and shows how exactly his companion had read and interpreted his mind.
"It would be a great injustice," Hobhouse had continued to Mrs. Leigh, in
reference to the "calamity" and the "charge," "to suppose that he has
dismissed the subject from his thoughts, or indeed from his conversation,
upon any other motive than that which the most bitter of his enemies would
commend. The uniformly guarded and tranquil manner shows the effort which
it is meant to hide." And there are just two passages in the Diary in
which we see the tranquil manner breaking down. In the first place at
Grindelwald:
"Starlight, beautiful, but a devil of a path. Never mind, got safe in;
a little lightning; but the whole of the day as fine in point of
weather as the day on which Paradise was made. Passed _whole woods of
withered pines, all withered_; trunks stripped and barkless, branches
lifeless; done by a single winter--their appearance reminded me of me
and my family."
In the second place, at the very end of the tour:
"I ... have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all
this--the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent
and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have
preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the Shepherd, the
crashing of the Avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the Glacier,
the Forest, nor the Cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight
upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my old wretched identity in the
majesty, and the power and the glory, around, above, and beneath me."
A striking admission truly of the unreality and insincerity of the Byronic
presentation of Wordsworth's Pantheism, and concluding with an exclamation
which shows clearly how distinct a thing Byron's individuality was to him,
and how far he was from picturing himself, in sober prose, as "a portion
of the tempest" or anything but his passionate and suffering self:
"I am past reproaches; and there is a time for all things. I am past
the wish of vengeance, and I know of none like for what I have
suffered; but the hour will come when what I feel must be felt, and
the--but enough."
And so up the Rhone valley and over the Simplon to Italy, where his life
was to enter upon yet another phase.
CHAPTER XXIV
FROM GENEVA TO VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE DRAPER'S WIFE
As long as Hobhouse remained with Byron nothing memorable happened. There
was a good deal of the schoolmaster about Hobhouse, though he could
sometimes unbend in a non-committal way; and in the presence of
schoolmasters life is seldom a drama and never an extravaganza. The
change, therefore, in the manner of Byron's life did not occur until,
tiring of his friend's supervision, he declined to accompany him to Rome.
In the meantime, first at Milan and then at Verona, he held up his head,
and passed like a pageant through the salons of the best continental
society.
Milan, he told Murray, was "very polite and hospitable." He parted there
from Polidori, who was expelled from the territory on account of a brawl
with an Austrian officer in a theatre; and he dined with the Marquis de
Brême--an Italian nobleman equally famous for his endeavours to popularise
vaccination and suppress mendicity--to meet Monti the Italian poet and
Stendhal the French novelist. "Never," wrote Stendhal of that meeting,
"shall I forget the sublime expression of his countenance; it was the
peaceful look of power united with genius." And a long account of Byron's
sojourn at Milan was contributed by Stendhal to the _Foreign Literary
Gazette_.
The introductions, Stendhal says, "passed with as much ceremonious gravity
as if our introducer had been de Brême's grandfather in days of yore
ambassador from the Duke of Savoy to the court of Louis XIV." He describes
Byron as "a dandy" who "expressed a constant dread of augmenting the bulk
of his outward man, concealed his right foot as much as possible, and
endeavoured to render himself agreeable in female society;" and he
proceeds to relate how female society sought to make itself agreeable to
him:
"His fine eyes, his handsome horses, and his fame gained him the
smiles of several young, lovely, and noble females, one of whom, in
particular, performed a journey of more than a hundred miles for the
pleasure of being present at a masked ball to which his Lordship was
invited. Byron was apprised of the circumstance, but either from
_hauteur_ or shyness, declined an introduction. 'Your poets are
perfect clowns,' cried the fair one, as she indignantly quitted the
ball-room."
And then again:
"Perhaps few cities could boast such an assemblage of lovely women as
that which chance had collected at Milan in 1817. Many of them had
flattered themselves with the idea that Byron would seek an
introduction; but whether from pride, timidity, or a remnant of
dandyism, which induced him to do exactly the contrary of what was
expected, he invariably declined the honour. He seemed to prefer a
conversation on poetical or philosophical subjects."
The explanation of his aloofness, Stendhal thought, might be that he "had
some guilty stain upon his conscience, similar to that which wrecked
Othello's fame." He suspected him of having, in a frenzy of jealousy,
"shortened the days of some fair Grecian slave, faithless to her vows of
love." That, it seemed to him, might account for the fact that he so often
"appeared to us like one labouring under an access of folly, often
approaching to madness." But, of course, as this narrative has
demonstrated, Stendhal was guessing wildly and guessing wrong; and the
thoughts which really troubled Byron were thoughts of the wreck of his
household gods, and the failure of his sentimental life, and perhaps also
of the failure of Miss Clairmont's free offering of a naïve and passionate
heart to awaken any answering emotion in his breast, or do more than tide
him over the first critical weeks following upon the separation. So he
wrote Moore a long letter from Verona, relating his kind reception by the
Milanese, discoursing of Milanese manners and morals, but then concluding:
"If I do not speak to you of my own affairs, it is not from want of
confidence, but to spare you and myself. My day is over--what then--I
have had it. To be sure, I have shortened it."
From Verona, too, he wrote on the same day to his sister, saying, after
compliments and small-talk: "I am also growing _grey_ and _giddy_, and
cannot help thinking my head will decay; I wish my memory would, at least
my remembrance." All of which seems to show Byron defiant, but not yet
reckless, preferring, if not actually enjoying, the society of his equals,
and still paying a very proper regard to appearances. The change occurred
when he got to Venice and Hobhouse left him there. Then there was a moral
collapse, just as if a moral support had been withdrawn--a collapse of
which the first outward sign was a new kind of intrigue.
Hitherto his amours had been with his social equals; and the daughters of
the people had, since his celebrity, had very little attraction for him.
Now the decline begins--a decline which was to conduct him to very
degraded depths; and our first intimation of it is in a letter written to
Moore within a week of his arrival. He begins with a comment on the decay
of Venice--"I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike
desolation"--and he proceeds:
"Besides, I have fallen in love, which next to falling into the canal
(which would be of no use as I can swim), is the best or the worst
thing I could do. I have got some extremely good apartments in the
house of a 'Merchant of Venice,' who is a good deal occupied with
business, and has a wife in her twenty-second year. Marianna (that is
her name) is in her appearance altogether like an antelope.... Her
features are regular and rather aquiline--mouth small--skin clear and
soft, with a kind of hectic colour--forehead remarkably good: her hair
is of the dark gloss, curl, and colour of Lady Jersey's: her figure is
light and pretty, and she is a famous songstress."
And so on at some length. Our only other witness to Marianna's charms and
character--a manuscript note to Moore's Life quoted in Murray's edition of
the Letters--describes her as "a demon of avarice and libidinousness who
intrigued with every resident in the house and every guest who visited
it." It is possible--it is even probable--that this description, made from
a different point of view than Byron's, fits her. Byron's enthusiasm was
for her physical, not her moral, attributes; and it does not appear that
he was under any illusion as to the latter. The former, however,
fascinated him; and we find him dwelling on them, in letter after letter,
to Murray as well as Moore--the publisher, indeed, being the first
recipient of the confidence that "Our little arrangement is completed; the
usual oaths having been taken, and everything fulfilled according to the
'understood relations' of such liaisons." Which means, very clearly, that
the draper's wife has become the poet's mistress, with the knowledge of
her husband, and to his pecuniary advantage.
The story is not one on which to dwell. It is less a story, indeed, than a
string of unrelated incidents. Though spun out and protracted, it does
not end but leaves off; and of the circumstances of its termination there
is no record. Marianna's avarice may have had something to do with it. So
may her habit, above referred to, of intriguing with all comers. But
nothing is known; and the one thing certain is that, though Byron was
attracted, sentiment played no part in the attraction. It would seem too
that he was only relatively faithful.
One gathers that from the account which he gives to Moore of a visit
received from Marianna's sister-in-law, whom Marianna caught in his
apartment, and seized by the hair, and slapped:
"I need not describe the screaming which ensued. The luckless visitor
took flight. I seized Marianna, who, after several vain attempts to
get away in pursuit of the enemy, fairly went into fits in my arms;
and, in spite of reasoning, eau de Cologne, vinegar, half a pint of
water, and God knows what other waters beside, continued so till past
midnight."
Whereupon enter Signor Segati himself, "her lord and master, and finds me
with his wife fainting upon the sofa, and all the apparatus of confusion,
dishevelled hair, hats, handkerchiefs, salts, smelling-bottles--and the
lady as pale as ashes, without sense or motion." And then, explanations
more or less suitable having been offered and accepted, "The
sister-in-law, very much discomposed at being treated in such wise, has
(not having her own shame before her eyes) told the affair to half Venice,
and the servants (who were summoned by the fight and the fainting) to the
other half."
And so forth, and so forth. It is all very vulgar, and none of it of the
faintest importance except for the sake of the light which it throws on
Byron's mind and disposition, though its importance is, from that point of
view, considerable. It shows Byron sick of sentiment because sentiment has
failed him and played him false, but grasping at the sensual pleasures of
love as the solid realities about which no mistake is possible. It shows
him, moreover, socially as well as sentimentally, on the down grade,
consorting with inferiors, and in some danger of unfitting himself for the
company of his equals.
The reckless note of the man resolved to enjoy himself, or at any rate to
keep up the pretence that he is doing so, although his heart is bankrupt,
is struck in one of the letters to Augusta. It refers to a previous
letter, not published, in which the tidings of the "new attachment" has
already been communicated, and to a letter addressed, some time
previously, to Lady Byron; and it continues:
"I was wretched enough when I wrote it, and had been so for many a
long day and month: at present I am less so, for reasons explained in
my late letter; and as I never pretend to be what I am not, you may
tell her, if you please, that I am recovering, and the reason also if
you like it."
Which is to say that he wishes Lady Byron to be told, _totidem verbis_,
and on authority which she cannot question, that, having lived connubially
with both, he very much prefers the draper's wife to her. And so, no
doubt, he did; for though the draper's wife, as well as Lady Byron, had
her faults, they were the faults of a naughty child rather than a pedantic
schoolmistress, and therefore less exasperating to a man in the mood to
which Byron had been driven. She might be--indeed she was--very jealous
and very violent; but at least she did not assume airs of moral
superiority and deliver lectures, or parade the heartlessness of one who
is determined to be always in the right.
So that Byron delighted to have her about him. "I am very well off with
Marianna, who is not at all a person to tire me," he told Murray in one
letter; and in another he wrote: "She is very pretty and pleasing, and
talks Venetian, which amuses me, and is naïve, and I can besides see her,
and make love with her at all or any hours, which is convenient to my
temperament." Just that, and nothing more than that; for such occasional
outbursts of sentiment and yearnings after higher things as we do find in
the letters of this date leave Signora Segati altogether on one side.
There is something of sentiment, for instance, in a letter to Mrs. Leigh
informing her that Miss Clairmont has borne Byron a daughter. The mother,
he says, is in England, and he prays God to keep her there; but then he
thinks of the child, and continues:
"They tell me it is very pretty, with blue eyes and _dark_ hair; and,
although I never was attached nor pretended attachment to the mother,
still in case of the eternal war and alienation which I foresee about
my legitimate daughter, Ada, it may be as well to have something to
repose a hope upon. I must love something in my old age, and probably
circumstances will render this poor little creature a great, and,
perhaps, my only comfort."
There is sentiment there; and there also is sentiment, although of a
different kind, in a letter written at about the same date to Moore:
"If I live ten years longer you will see, however, that it is not over
with me--I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing; and it may
seem odd enough to say, I do not think it my vocation. But you will
see that I shall do something or other--the times and fortune
permitting--that, 'like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will
puzzle the philosophers of all ages.' But I doubt whether my
constitution will hold out. I have exorcised it most devilishly."
This is a strikingly interesting, because an unconsciously prophetic,
passage. Byron's ultimate efforts to "do something"--something quite
unconnected with literature--is the most famous, and some would say the
most glorious, incident in his life. We shall come to it very soon, and we
shall see how his constitution, so sorely tried by an indiscreet diet and
excessive indulgence in all things from love to Epsom Salts, just allowed
him to begin his task, but did not suffer him to finish it. Enough to note
here that Byron saw the better even when he preferred the worse, and never
lost faith in himself even in his most degraded years, but always looked
forward, even then, to the day when he would shake off sloth and
sensuality in order to be worthy of his higher self.
He divined that the power to do that would be restored to him in the
end--that social outlawry, though it might daze him, could not crush
him--that it would come to be, in the end, a kind of education, and a
source of self-reliance. But not yet, and not for a good many years to
come. Before the moral recovery could begin, the moral collapse had to be
completed; and the affair with the draper's wife was only the first
milestone on the downward path. We shall have to follow him past other
milestones before we see him turning back.
CHAPTER XXV
AT VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER'S WIFE--DISSOLUTE PROCEEDINGS IN THE
MOCENIGO PALACE--ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND REFORMATION
For six weeks or so in May and June 1817 Byron tore himself away from
Marianna and visited Rome, where he dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat to
Thorwaldsen for his bust, and gathered the materials for the Fourth Canto
of "Childe Harold." He refused, however, for Marianna's sake, to go on
with Hobhouse to Naples, but hurried back to her, bidding her meet him
half-way, and afterwards taking her, but not her husband, to a villa at La
Mira, on the Brenta, a few miles out of Venice. It seems that the
neighbours, less particular than the leaders of English society, yet
including a marquis as well as a physician with four unmarried daughters,
hastened to call, if not on the lady, at all events on him. Monk Lewis
paid him a short visit, and Hobhouse, on his return from Naples, stayed
for some time in a house close by, studying in the Ducal Library, and
amassing the erudition which appears in his notes to "Childe Harold."
Praise of Marianna, however, disappears from Byron's letters at this
period; and one may infer from his comment on the news of the death of
Madame de Staël that, if Marianna had ever made him happy, she had now
ceased to do so.
"With regard to death," he then wrote to Murray, "I doubt that we have
any right to pity the dead for their own sakes."
This is not the note of a man who has found happiness in love or even
pleasure in dissipation. Apparently the novelty of the new experiences was
wearing off; and Byron was becoming sick of the isolation and
uneventfulness of his life. He had gone to Venice largely because there
was no English society there--and yet he missed it; Hoppner, the
Consul-General being almost his only English friend. He had access to
Venetian society, and to some extent, mixed in it; but he did not find it
interesting. He tired of the receptions alike of Signora Benzoni the
worldly, and of Signora Albrizzi the "blue," at which, no doubt, he was
stared at as a marvel of fascinating profligacy; and he also tired of
Marianna Segati, who doubtless gave him an excuse for breaking off his
relations with her; and then there followed a further and deeper plunge.
The departure of Hobhouse seems, as usual, to have given the signal. It
was about the time of his departure that Byron gave up his lodging in the
draper's shop and moved into the Mocenigo Palace; and the letter in which
Murray is advised that Hobhouse is on his way home continues thus:
"It is the height of the Carnival, and I am in the _estrum_ and
agonies of a new intrigue with I don't exactly know whom or what,
except that she is insatiate of love, and won't take money, and has
light hair and blue eyes, which are not common here, and that I met
her at the Masque, and that when her mask is off, I am as wise as
ever. I shall make what I can of the remainder of my youth."
A vow which he kept after a fashion as innumerable passages from
innumerable letters prove--Moore, Murray, and James Wedderburn Webster
receiving his confidences in turn. Venice, he assures the last named, "is
by no means the most regular and correct moral city in the universe;" and
he continues, describing the life there--not everybody's life, of course,
but the life with which he has chosen to associate himself:
"Young and old--pretty and ugly--high and low--are employed in the
laudable practice of Love-making--and though most Beauty is found
amongst the middling and lower classes--this of course only renders
their amatory habits more universally diffused."
Then to Moore there is talk of "a Venetian girl with large black eyes, a
face like Faustina's and the figure of a Juno--tall and energetic as a
Pythoness, with eyes flashing, and her dark eyes streaming in the
moonlight;" while to Murray there is a long account of the affair with
Margarita Cogni, the baker's wife, with whom the draper's wife disputed
publicly for Byron's favours:
"Margarita threw back her veil, and replied in very explicit Venetian:
'_You_ are _not_ his _wife_: _I_ am _not_ his _wife_: _you_ are his
_Donna_ and _I_ am his _Donna_; _your_ husband is a cuckold, and
_mine_ is another. For the rest what right have you to reproach me? if
he prefers what is mine to what is yours, is it my fault? if you wish
to secure him, tie him to your petticoat-string; but do not think to
speak to me without a reply because you happen to be richer than I
am.' Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence (which I relate
as it was translated to me by a bye-stander), she went on her way,
leaving a numerous audience with Madame Segati, to ponder at her
leisure on the dialogue between them."
And Byron goes on to tell other stories of Margarita's jealousy, relating
that "she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women
... so that, I being at the time somewhat promiscuous, there was great
confusion and demolition of head-dresses and handkerchiefs; and sometimes
my servants, in 'redding' the fray between her and other feminine persons,
received more knocks than acknowledgments for their peaceful endeavours."
And then follows the story of Margarita's flight from her husband's house
to Byron's palace, and her husband's application to the police to restore
her to him, and her second desertion of "that consumptive cuckold," as she
styled him in open court, and her final success in settling herself as a
fixture in Byron's establishment, without his formal consent, but with his
indolent acquiescence.
She became his housekeeper, with the result that "the expenses were
reduced to less than half, and everybody did their duty better." But she
also had an ungovernable temper, suppressed all letters in a feminine
handwriting, threatened violence with a table-knife, and had to be
disarmed by Fletcher; so that Byron at last tired of her and told her to
go. She then went quietly downstairs and threw herself into the canal, but
was fished out, brought to with restoratives, and sent away a second time.
"And this," Byron concludes, "is the story of Margarita Cogni, as far as
it belongs to me."
Like the story of Marianna Segati, it is hardly a story at all; and there
seem to have been several other stories very much like it running
concurrently with it. So, at all events, Byron told Augusta, who passed
the news on to Hodgson, saying that her brother had written "on the old
subject very uncomfortably, and on his present pursuits which are what one
would dread and expect; a string of low attachments." And if a picture of
the life, drawn by an eye-witness, be desired, one has only to turn to
Shelley's letter on the subject to Thomas Love Peacock.
The subject of Shelley's comments is the point of view and "tone of mind"
of certain passages in "Childe Harold." He finds here "a kind of obstinate
and self-willed folly," and he continues:
"Nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these
expressions of contempt and desperation. The fact is that, first, the
Italian women with whom he associates are, perhaps, the most
contemptible of all who exist under the moon--the most ignorant, the
most disgusting, the most bigoted; Countesses smell so strongly of
garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L. B.
is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his
gondolieri pick up in the streets. He associates with wretches who
seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do
not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but I
believe, seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but
he endures. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and
contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature
and habits of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and
despair?... And he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to
him, but, unfortunately, it does not outlast your departure. No, I do
not doubt, and for his sake I ought to hope, that his present career
must end soon in some violent circumstance."
This, it is to be remarked, is the picture, not of an enemy, but of a
friend--one who already admired Byron as the greatest poet of his
generation, and was to learn to admire him as one of its greatest men: a
man capable of doing great things as well as dreaming them. Evidently,
therefore, it is, as far as it goes, a true picture, though there is
something to be added to it--something which blackens, and also something
which brightens it.
Byron, to begin with, was, during this dark period, as careless of his
appearance as of his morals. It was not necessary to his facile conquests
among the Venetian courtesans that he should be either sober or
well-groomed. It may even, on the contrary, have been necessary that he
should drink too much and go unkempt in order to live comfortably on their
level. At all events he did drink too much--preferring fiery spirits to
the harmless Italian wines--and indulged a large appetite for
miscellaneous foods, and ceased his frequentation of the barber's shop;
with the result that the flesh, set free from its customary discipline,
revolted and spread abroad, and Hanson, who came to Byron at Venice to
settle about the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, reported to Augusta
that he had found him "_fat_, immensely large, and his hair long." James
Wedderburn Webster, a few months later, heard of his "corpulence" as
"stupendous;" and Byron, while objecting to that epithet, was constrained
to admit that it was considerable.
There were limits, however, to his excesses; and if misconduct was
sometimes three parts of life for him, there always remained the fourth
part to be devoted to other activities and interests. Even at his most
debased hours Byron never quite lost his love of literature and out-door
exercise, or his genius for friendship with men of like tastes with
himself, who judged him as they found him and not as his wife said that he
was; so that a picture contrasting pleasantly from Shelley's may be taken
from Consul-General Hoppner, whom Byron took almost daily in his gondola
to ride on the Lido:
"Nothing could be more delightful than these rides on the Lido were to
me. We were from half to three quarters of an hour crossing the water,
during which his conversation was always most amusing and interesting.
Sometimes he would bring with him any new book he had received, and
read to me the passages which most struck him. Often he would repeat
to me whole stanzas of the poems he was engaged in writing, as he had
composed them on the preceding evening; and this was the more
interesting to me because I could frequently trace in them some idea
which he had started in our conversation of the preceding day, or some
remark the effect of which he had evidently been trying upon me.
Occasionally, too, he spoke of his own affairs, making me repeat all I
had heard with regard to him, and desiring that I would not spare him,
but let him know the worst that was said."
The two reports must be read, of course, not as contradicting but as
supplementing one another; so that a just estimate of the actual situation
may not be very difficult to arrive at.
Byron, it is important to remember, though he had so many adventures, was
only thirty years of age; and at thirty even a man of genius is still very
young; and a very young man is always apt, given the provocation, to
challenge public attention by going to the devil conspicuously and with a
blare of trumpets. He may or may not like, and therefore nurse, the idea
that he has tied his life up into such a knot that nothing but death--his
own death or another's--can untie it; but he is quite ready, as a rule, to
accept the tangle, if not to welcome it, as an excuse for a sensational
plunge into the abysms of debauchery. And this is especially so if his
passions are strong, and if his private affairs have been a public
pageant, watched, whether for praise or censure, by innumerable eyes.
Both those conditions were fulfilled in Byron's case. Consequently he set
out to swagger to the devil--as cynical now as he had once been
sentimental--convinced, or at any rate affecting to be convinced, that, in
a so-called love affair, nothing mattered but the sensual satisfaction;
promiscuous in his habits and careless of his health--pleased to let Lady
Byron know that he found more pleasure in the society of the scum of the
stews of Venice than in hers--delighted also to think that the community
at large were shocked by his dissolute proceedings. We have just seen him
asking his sister to inform his wife what he was doing and how he was
living. His friend Harness, who had long since lost sight of him, assures
us that one of his great joys was to send defamatory paragraphs about
himself to the continental newspapers in the hope that the English press
would copy them, and that the world would believe him to be even worse
than he was. He was vicious, that is to say, and he was also, as the Duc
de Broglie called him, a "fanfaron of vice."
It was a phase which he had to pass through, but no more; for such a man
could not possibly go on living such a life for long. The real risk for
his reputation was that he should die before the phase was finished, die
in a house which was little better than a brothel, with Venetian
prostitutes tearing each other's hair and scratching each other's faces by
his bedside. The end, indeed, might easily have come in that ignominious
fashion; for he had a recurrence of the malaria to which he had been
liable ever since his first journey to Greece, and, in view of the
liberties which he had taken with his constitution, it is rather
surprising that he recovered from it. Still, he did recover; and, whether
ill or well, he never quite lost sight of the better possibilities.
His harem claimed his days, but not, as a rule, his nights. There came,
pretty regularly, an hour when the revelry ceased and the domestic female
companions were packed off to their several beds; and then pens and ink
and ardent spirits were set before Byron, and he wrote. It was, indeed,
just when his life was most dissolute that his genius was brightest. He
wrote "Manfred," the poem in which he responded to the challenge of his
calumniators, and showed that he could, if he chose, cast a halo round the
very charge with which they had sought to crush him. He wrote the Fourth
Canto of "Childe Harold," in which we see the last of the admired Byronic
pose. He began "Don Juan," the poem in which the sincere cynic, who has
come to cynicism by way of sentiment, passes with a light step from the
pathetic to the ribald, and, attacking all hypocrisies, from those of Mrs.
Grundy to those of the Holy Alliance, brushes them impatiently away like
cobwebs.
Byron, in short, remained a fighter even in the midst of his
self-indulgences; and for the fighter there is always hope.
Self-indulgence brings satiety, but fighting does not, when it can be seen
that the blows are telling; and there could be no question of the effect
of Byron's blows. Though the sea rolled between him and his countrymen, he
shocked them as they had never been shocked before. Regarding him as the
wickedest of wicked men, they admitted that his was a wickedness that had
to be reckoned with, which was exactly what he wished and had intended.
Perhaps he shocked them more for the fun of the thing than as the
conscious champion of any particular cause; but that does not matter. The
greatest builders are nearly always those who are building better than
they know; and the building, at any rate, saved Byron from suffering too
much harm from the loose manner of his life, and helped him to await his
opportunity.
"I am only a spectator upon earth, until a tenfold opportunity offers. It
may come yet," he wrote to Moore about this time. The passage is
enigmatical, and may only refer to some dream of vengeance cherished
against Lady Byron and her advisers. On the other hand, it may just as
well be a second reference to that resolution to "do something,"--something
which "like the cosmogony or creation of the world will puzzle the
philosophers of all ages,"--formulated in the letter to Moore already
quoted. The letter, at all events, is quickly followed by news of the
illness already mentioned, and of which there is a more or less particular
account in one of the letters to Murray:
"You ask about my health: about the beginning of the year I was in a
state of great exhaustion, attended by such debility of stomach that
nothing remained upon it; and I was obliged to reform my 'way of
life,' which was conducting me from the Yellow leaf to the Ground,
with all deliberate speed. I am better in health and in morals, and
very much yours ever,
"B."
This change in the "way of life" meant, of course, in the first instance,
the restoration of the draper's and baker's wives to the baker and draper
respectively, and the return of the professional prostitutes to the places
in which they normally plied their trade. It also meant, in the second
place, the courtship of the Countess Guiccioli, a branch of the subject to
be dealt with in a separate chapter.
CHAPTER XXVI
IN THE VENETIAN SALONS--INTRODUCTION TO COUNTESS GUICCIOLI
Even at the time when the draper's and baker's wives were quarrelling over
their claims to his attentions--even at the time when the baker's wife was
routing the rest of the harem, and threatening violence with
carving-knives--Byron never quite lost his foothold in the Venetian
salons. There were two such salons, such as they were--that of the
Countess Albrizzi, who aspired to be literary, and was styled the Venetian
de Staël, and that of the Countess Benzoni, who aspired, in modern
parlance, to be smart; and Byron was welcome in both of them, and could
even wound the feelings of either hostess by preferring the receptions of
her rival.
Both hostesses knew, of course, how he spent the time which he did not
spend with them. They saw the draper's wife in his box at the theatre;
they saw the baker's wife frolicking with him at the Carnival; they heard
shocking stories of the "goings on" at the Mocenigo Palace. But they
considered that these matters were not their business--or at all events
did not concern them very much. They knew that English milords were mad,
and that men of genius were mad; and, as Byron was both of these things,
they could pardon him for possessing a double dose of eccentricity.
Moreover, in a country in which most wives as well as most husbands were
unfaithful, the fuss made about Lady Byron's grievances, whatever they
might be, appeared ridiculous. Why, they asked themselves, looking at the
matter from their Italian view-point, could not Lady Byron take a lover
and be happy instead of assuming the airs of a martyr, organising a
persecution, and hiring lawyers to throw mud? And they noted, too, that
Byron had picturesque ways of demonstrating that, though he followed
depraved courses, he was, at the bottom of his heart, disgusted with them,
and profoundly conscious of his capability of walking in sublimer paths.
"An additional proof," says Moore, "that, in this short, daring career
of libertinism, he was but desperately seeking relief for a wronged
and mortified spirit, and
'_What to us seem'd guilt might be but woe_,'--
is that, more than once, of an evening, when his house has been in the
possession of such visitants, he has been known to hurry away in his
gondola, and pass the greater part of the night upon the water, as if
hating to return to his home."
Allowances, it was clear (to the ladies), must be made for a man (or at
all events for a milord and a poet) who, even when passing from the arms
of a draper's to a baker's wife, could thus search for, even if he could
not "set up,"
"_a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow_."
They made the allowances, therefore, showing that, even if they sometimes
disapproved, they were always ready to forgive when the footman threw open
the door and announced the return of the prodigal. To Countess Albrizzi,
on these occasions, "his face appeared tranquil like the ocean on a fine
Spring morning," while his hands "were as beautiful as if they had been
works of art," and his eyes "of the azure colour of the heavens, from
which they seemed to derive their origin." This, though Countess Albrizzi
was nearly sixty years of age; so that one can readily imagine the
impression made upon Countess Guiccioli, whose husband was sixty, but who
was herself little more than seventeen.
[Illustration: _Countess Guiccioli._]
"I became acquainted with Lord Byron," she wrote to Moore, "in the
April of 1819; he was introduced to me at Venice by the Countess
Benzoni at one of that lady's parties. This introduction, which had so
much influence over the lives of us both, took place contrary to our
wishes, and had been permitted by us only from courtesy. For myself,
more fatigued than usual that evening on account of the late hours
they keep at Venice, I went with great repugnance to this party, and
purely in obedience to Count Guiccioli. Lord Byron, too, who was
averse to forming new acquaintances--alleging that he had entirely
renounced all attachments, and was unwilling any more to expose
himself to their consequences--on being requested by the Countess
Benzoni to allow himself to be presented to me, refused, and, at last,
only assented from a desire to oblige her. His noble and exquisitely
beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the
thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so different
and so superior a being to any whom I had hitherto seen that it was
impossible he should not have left the most profound impression upon
me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at
Venice, we met every day."
The girl Countess's maiden name was Teresa Gamba; and she had been married
to her elderly husband for his money. He was in his sixtieth year, and was
worth about £12,000 a year. In his youth he had collaborated with Alfieri
in the establishment of a national theatre. Now his principal interests
were political--as were also those of the Gamba family--and the police had
their eyes on them in consequence. His principal establishment was at
Ravenna; and he was on the point of starting for Ravenna, breaking the
journey at various mansions which he possessed upon the road, on the
evening on which his wife, acting "purely in obedience," to his
instructions, attended the reception at which she lost her heart.
He removed her from Venice a very few days afterwards; but by that time
the mischief was done, and it was not the heart only that had been lost.
Byron had pressed his suit with impetuous precipitation, and Countess
Guiocioli had yielded--without, as it would seem, the least idea that
there could be any harm in her doing so.
Morality, as has been said, is a matter partly of geography and partly of
chronology; and, in the Italy of those days, no woman got credit for
fidelity unless she had a lover, as well as a husband, to be faithful to.
So Madame Guiccioli punctuated her departure with fainting fits, and then
wrote Byron appealing letters, begging him to follow her as soon as she
had prepared the minds of her relatives to receive him.
To do so occupied her until the first days of June; and the further
development of events may be best related in extracts from Byron's
letters:
"About the 20th I leave Venice, to take a journey into Romagna; but
shall probably return in a month."
This to Murray, as early as May 6. On May 20, we find him still going, but
not yet gone: "Next week I set out for Romagna, at least in all
probability." On June 2, a letter addressed to Hoppner from Padua shows
that he has started, but that, the favours he sought having been accorded
to him at Venice, he is not very anxious to take a hot and dusty journey
for the purpose of following up the intrigue:
"Now to go to Cuckold a Papal Count, who, like Candide, has already
been 'the death of two men, one of whom was a priest,' in his own
house is rather too much for my modesty, when there are several other
places at least as good for the purpose. She says they must go to
Bologna in the middle of June, and why the devil then drag me to
Ravenna? However I shall determine nothing till I get to Bologna, and
probably take some time to decide when I am there, so that, the Gods
willing, you may probably see me again soon. The Charmer forgets that
a man may be whistled anywhere _before_, but that _after_, a journey
in an Italian June is a Conscription, and therefore she should have
been less liberal in Venice, or less exigent at Ravenna."
That letter is the first which throws light on the vexed question whether
Byron really loved Madame Guiccioli, or merely viewed her as an eligible
mistress. It is to be observed, however, that his conduct was less cynical
than his correspondence, and that the Countess, on her part, saw no reason
for suspecting insincerity. "I shall stay but a few days at Bologna," is
his announcement when he gets there; and the Countess relates his arrival:
"Dante's tomb, the classical pine wood, the relics of antiquity which
are to be found in that place, afforded a sufficient pretext for me to
invite him to come, and for him to accept my invitation. He came, in
fact, in the month of June ... while I, attacked by a consumptive
complaint, which had its origin from the moment of my quitting Venice,
appeared on the point of death.... His motives for such a visit became
the subject of discussion, and these he himself afterwards
involuntarily divulged; for having made some inquiries with a view to
paying me a visit, and being told that it was unlikely he would ever
see me again, he replied, if such were the case, he hoped that he
should die also; which circumstance, being repeated, revealed the
object of his journey."
The narrative adds that Count Guiccioli himself begged Byron to call in
the hope that his society might be beneficial to his wife's health; and it
is, at all events, certain that Byron's arrival was followed by a
remarkably rapid recovery, explicable from the fact, set forth by Byron,
that her complaint, after all, was not consumption but a "fausse couche."
The husband's attitude, however, puzzled him. "If I come away with a
Stiletto in my gizzard some fine afternoon," he writes, "I shall not be
astonished;" and he proceeds:
"I cannot make _him_ out at all, he visits me frequently, and takes me
out (like Whittington the Lord Mayor) in a coach and _six_ horses....
By the aid of a Priest, a Chambermaid, a young negro-boy, and a female
friend, we are enabled to carry on our unlawful loves, as far as they
can well go, though generally with some peril, especially as the
female friend and priest are at present out of town for some days, so
that some of the precautions devolve upon the Maid and Negro."
That, it will be agreed, is rather the language of Don Juan than of a
really devout lover; but there is more of the lover and less of the Don
Juan in the letters which succeed. In the letter to Murray, for instance,
dated June 29:
"I see my _Dama_ every day at the proper and improper hours; but I
feel seriously uneasy about her health, which seems very precarious.
In losing her I should lose a being who has run great risks on my
account, and whom I have every reason to love, but I must not think
this possible. I do not know what I _should_ do if she died, but I
ought to blow my brains out, and I hope that I should. Her husband is
a very polite personage, but I wish he would not carry me out in his
Coach and Six, like Whittington and his Cat."
And still more in a letter to Hoppner dated July 2:
"If anything happens to my present _Amica_, I have done with passion
for ever, it is my _last_ love. As to libertinism, I have sickened
myself of that, as was natural in the way I went on, and have at least
derived that advantage from vice, to _love_ in the better sense of the
word. _This_ will be my last adventure. I can hope no more to inspire
attachment, and I trust never again to feel it."
But then, in a letter to Murray, dated August 9, there is a relapse and a
change of tone:
"My 'Mistress dear,' who hath 'fed my heart upon smiles and wine' for
the last two months, set out for Bologna with her husband this
morning, and it seems that I follow him at three to-morrow morning. I
cannot tell how our romance will end, but it hath gone on hitherto
most erotically--such perils and escapes--Juan's are a child's play in
comparison."
Gallantry, not passion, is the note there; but, on the other hand, passion
and not gallantry prevails in the letter to the Countess, written on a
blank page of her copy of "Corinne," which Byron had read in her garden in
her absence:
"My destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of
age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had stayed there, with
all my heart, or, at least, that I had never met you in your married
state.
"But all this is too late. I love you and you love me--at least you
_say so_, and _act_ as if you _did_ so, which last is a great
consolation in all events. But _I_ more than love you, and cannot
cease to love you."
"Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us--but
they never will unless you _wish_ it."
A series of contradictions with which we must be content to be perplexed;
though perhaps they indicate nothing except that Byron changed his mind
from time to time, and was more in love on some days than on others. And
that, of course, it may be urged, is pretty much the same as saying that
he was not, in the fullest sense of the words, in love at all.
That his feelings for the Countess differed from his feelings for the
wives of the baker and the draper is, indeed, clear enough. Otherwise he
would not have drawn the invidious distinction which we have seen him
drawing between the "libertinism" of the earlier intrigues and the
"romance" of the later one. Those passions had depended solely on the
senses; into this one sentiment and intellectual sympathy entered. That is
what his biographers are thinking of when they say that the new attachment
either lifted him out of the mire or, at least, prevented him from
slipping back into it. That, in particular, is what Shelley meant when he
wrote of Byron as "greatly improved in every respect" and apparently
becoming "a virtuous man," and added, by way of explanation: "The
connection with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him."
But that, after all merely signifies that Byron, having a lady instead of
a loose woman for his mistress, had to forswear sack and live cleanly--a
thing which the painful effects of his excesses on his health had already
disposed him to do. It does not signify that he had found a love which
filled his life, or healed his wounds, or effaced the memories of his
earlier loves; and there is, in fact, a poem of the period to which Mr.
Richard Edgcumbe points as circumstantial proof that, even when he was
paying his suit to Madame Guiccioli, Byron's heart was in England, with
Mary Chaworth.
* * * * *
Three years had passed since he had seen her. Her mind had been
temporarily deranged by her troubles, but she had recovered. She had been
reconciled to her husband, and was living with him at Colwick Hall, near
Nottingham. Close to the walls of that old mansion flows the river Trent;
and Byron wrote the lines beginning:
"_River that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the Lady of my love, when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me._"
The common supposition is that the river invoked is the Po, and that the
lady referred to is Madame Guiccioli; but that can hardly be. Seeing that
Madame Guiccioli was, at this time, beseeching Byron to come to her arms
at Ravenna, her recollection of him could hardly be described as "fair and
fleeting." The allusion is evidently to an anterior passion; and Madame
Guiccioli's place in the poem comes in a later stanza:
"_My blood is all meridian: were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot,
A slave again to Love--at least of thee._"
And then again:
"_A stranger loves the Lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the bleak wind that chills the polar flood._
"_'Tis vain to struggle--let me perish young--
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved:
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne'er be moved._"
The conclusion here clearly is that Byron is committed to passion because
his temperament compels it, and is very grateful to Madame Guiccioli for
loving him, but that if Mary Chaworth should ever lift a little finger and
beckon him, he would leave Madame Guiccioli and go to her.
So Mr. Edgcumbe argues; and he makes out his case--a case which we shall
find nothing to contradict, and something to confirm when we get back to
our story.
CHAPTER XXVII
BYRON'S RELATIONS WITH THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI AND HER HUSBAND AT RAVENNA
Countess Guiccioli speaks of Byron's regard for her as "the serious
attachment which he had wished to avoid, but which had mastered his whole
heart, and induced him to live an isolated life with the person he loved
in a town of Romagna, far from all that could flatter his vanity and from
all intercourse with his countrymen." The account is not altogether
inaccurate, but it omits one important fact: the Countess's own resolute
insistence that Byron's society was essential to her happiness and even to
her life.
At first, it seems clear, his sole objective was the seduction of his
neighbour's wife. He was engaged, as he thought, upon an affair not of
sentiment but of gallantry; and he had no idea that his neighbour's wife,
having consented to be seduced, would expect him to dance attendance on
her for ever afterwards. So much seems evident from the letter in which he
complains of being dragged to Ravenna in a blazing Italian June. His
mistress, however, had compelled him to come by pleading illness; and she
did not scruple to repeat that plea as often as she found any difficulty
in getting her own way. "I am ill--so ill. Send for Lord Byron or I shall
die;" that was the refrain which helped her to reorganise her life.
Having joined her at Ravenna, Byron, as we have seen, accompanied her to
Bologna. It was at Bologna that he wrote the love letter, quoted in the
preceding chapter, in Madame Guiccioli's copy of "Corinne." From Bologna,
too, he wrote to Murray, asking him to use his influence to procure Count
Guiccioli a nomination as British Vice-Consul--an unsalaried office which
would entitle him to British protection in the event of political
disturbances; and at Bologna, finally, occurred Countess Guiccioli's
second diplomatic indisposition.
"Some business," she told Moore, "having called Count Guiccioli to
Ravenna, I was obliged by the state of my health, instead of
accompanying him, to return to Venice, and he consented that Lord
Byron should be the companion of my journey. We left Bologna on
September 15.... When I arrived at Venice, the physicians ordered that
I should try the country air; and Lord Byron, having a Villa at La
Mira, gave it up to me, and came to reside there with me. At this
place we passed the Autumn."
At this place, too, the plot began to thicken in a manner which throws
light upon Count Guiccioli's character. He wrote proposing that Byron
should lend him £1000; and when Byron refused to do anything of the kind,
seeing that the Count was a richer man than he, he demanded that the
Countess should return to him; so that letters of October 29 and November
8 contain these significant passages:
"Count G. comes to Venice next week, and I am requested to consign his
wife to him, which shall be done--with all her linen."
"Count G. has arrived in Venice, and has presented his spouse (who had
preceded him two months for her health and the prescriptions of Dr.
Aglietti) with a paper of conditions, regulations of hours and conduct
and morals, &c., which he insists on her accepting, and she persists
in refusing. I am expressly, it would seem, excluded by this treaty,
as an indispensable preliminary; so that they are in high discussion,
and what the result may be I know not, particularly as they are
consulting friends."
The view of the friends--that is to say of the Italy of the period--was
that morals were of little but appearances of great importance. Married
women might have lovers--one lover at a time--but their amours must be
conducted in their own homes and under their husbands' patronage. By
running away with their lovers they put themselves in the wrong; and the
men who ran away with them showed themselves ignorant of the manners of
good society; so that Countess Belzoni, who knew all about the draper's
wife and the baker's wife and the promiscuous debaucheries of the
Mocenigo Palace, remarked to Moore, who was passing through Venice at the
time: "It is such a pity, you know. Until he did that, he had been
behaving with such perfect propriety."
So the debate proceeded; the girl wife and the sexagenarian husband giving
each other pieces of their several minds, and the friends offering good
advice to both of them, while Byron, who was excluded from the Council
Chamber, sat below and wrote to Murray:
"As I tell you that the Guiccioli business is on the eve of exploding
in one way or the other, I will just add that, without attempting to
influence the decision of the Contessa, a good deal depends upon it.
If she and her husband make it up you will, perhaps, see me in England
sooner than you expect; if not, I shall retire with her to France or
America, change my name, and live a quiet provincial life. All this
may seem odd, but I have got the poor girl into a scrape; and as
neither her birth, nor her rank, nor her connections by birth or
marriage are inferior to my own, I am in honour bound to support her
through: besides, she is a very pretty woman--ask Moore--and not yet
one and twenty."
That, once again, is not the language of a man whom an invincible passion
has swept off his feet. It is the language of the man who lets himself be
loved rather than of the man who loves--the man who will preserve an even
mind whether he retains his mistress or loses her, and whose affection for
her only carries him to the point of saying that, whatever happens, at any
rate he will not treat her badly. It is a point, at any rate, beyond that
to which his affection for Miss Clairmont ever carried him; but it is
hardly the furthest point to which it is possible for love to go.
* * * * *
"With some difficulty, and many internal struggles, I reconciled the lady
with her lord," is the language in which Byron relates the upshot of the
negotiations. "I think," he continues, "of setting out for England by the
Tyrol in a few days"; but only six days later he has changed his plans.
"Pray," he then writes to Murray, "let my sister be informed that I am not
coming as I intended: I have not the courage to tell her so myself, at
least not yet; but I will soon, _with the reasons_." And about the reasons
there is, of course, no mystery.
Count Guiccioli, having gained the day, had carried his wife off to
Ravenna, and Byron had missed her more than he had expected. Hoppner
writes of him as "very much out of spirits, owing to Madame Guiccioli's
departure, and out of humour with everybody and everything around him." He
had had his belongings packed for his return to England, and had even
dressed for the journey, but had changed his mind, and unpacked and
undressed again at the last minute; and Madame Guiccioli, in the meantime,
had had her third diplomatic indisposition, and threatened yet again to
die unless Byron were brought to her. So that presently, on January 2,
1820, we find Byron back again at Ravenna, and giving Moore a curious
explanation of his movements:
"After her arrival at Ravenna the Guiccioli fell ill again too; and at
last her father (who had, all along, opposed the _liaison_ most
violently till now) wrote to me to say that she was in such a state
that _he_ begged me to come and see her--and that her husband had
acquiesced, in consequence of her relapse, and that _he_ (her father)
would guarantee all this, and that there would be no further scenes in
consequence between them, and that I should not be compromised in any
way. I set out soon after and have been here ever since. I found her a
good deal altered, but getting better."
At first he seems to have supposed that he was merely a visitor like
another; and a letter to Hoppner, dated January 20, shows him uncertain as
to the duration of his stay:
"I may stay a day, a week, a year, all my life; but all this depends
upon what I can neither see nor foresee. I came because I was called,
and will go the moment that I perceive what may render my departure
proper. My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor
the microscopic accuracy of the close to such _liaisons_; but 'time
and the hour' must decide upon what I do."
Here, yet again, one detects a note of hesitation incompatible with
perfect love. The very letter, however, which expresses the hesitations
also contains directions for the forwarding of his furniture, which looks
as though Byron already foresaw and accepted his fate. He was destined, in
fact, to live with the household of the Guicciolis on the same terms on
which he had previously lived with the household of the Segatis--engaging
an apartment in their mansion, and paying a rent to the husband while
making love to the wife--and to be what the Italians call a _cicisbeo_ and
the English a tame cat. He admits, in various letters, that that is his
position, and that he does not altogether like it. "I can't say," he tells
Hobhouse, "that I don't feel the degradation;" but he nevertheless submits
to it, describing himself to Hoppner as "drilling very hard to learn how
to double a shawl," and giving the same correspondent a graphic picture of
his first appearance in his new character:
"The G.'s object appeared to be to parade her foreign lover as much as
possible, and, faith, if she seemed to glory in the scandal, it was
not for me to be ashamed of it. Nobody seemed surprised; all the
women, on the contrary, were, as it were, delighted with the excellent
example. The Vice-legate, and all the other Vices, were as polite as
could be; and I, who had acted on the reserve, was fairly obliged to
take the lady under my arm, and look as much like a Cicisbeo as I
could on so short a notice, to say nothing of the embarrassment of a
cocked hat and sword, much more formidable to me than it ever will be
to the enemy."
A picture in which no one's part is dignified, and no one's emotions are
strained to a tense pitch, but everybody is happy and comfortable in an
easy-going way. One gets the same impression from Byron's reply to
Murray's suggestion that he should write "a volume of manners, &c. on
Italy." There are many reasons, he says, why he does not care to touch
that subject in print; but he assures Murray privately that the Italian
morality, though widely different from the English, has nevertheless "its
rules and its fitnesses and decorums." The women "exact fidelity from a
lover as a debt of honour, while they pay the husband as a tradesman, that
is not at all." At the same time, he adds, "the greatest outward respect
is to be paid to the husbands, not only by the ladies, but by their
_serventi_," so that "you would suppose them relations," and might imagine
the _servente_ to be "one adopted into the family."
But this was an Arcadian state of things too good to last. Exactly how or
why it came to an end one does not know; but probably because, while the
Countess was too vehemently in love to control the expression of her
feelings, Byron's European importance overshadowed her husband, made him
feel foolish, and challenged him to assert himself. Whatever the reason,
the arrangement only remained idyllic for about four months, and then, in
May 1821, there began to be talk of divorce, "on account of our having
been taken together _quasi_ in the fact, and, what is worse, that she does
not _deny_ it."
She was so far from denying it, indeed, that she protested that it was a
shame that she should be the only woman in Romagna who was not allowed to
have a lover, and declared that, unless her husband did allow her to have
a lover, she would not live with him. Her family took her part, saying
that her husband, having tolerated her infidelity for so long, had
forfeited, his right to make a fuss about it. The ladies of Ravenna, and
the populace, also made the business theirs, and supported the lovers, on
general principles, because they were of the age for love and the husband
was not, and also because Count Guiccioli was an unpleasant person and
unpopular.
He was, indeed, not only unpleasant and unpopular, but also reputed to be
a desperate and dangerous character, careful, indeed, of his own elderly
skin, but quite capable of hiring bravos to assassinate those who crossed
his path. "Warning was given me," Byron writes to Moore, "not to take such
long rides in the Pine Forest without being on my guard;" and again:
"The principal security is that he has not the courage to spend twenty
scudi--the average price of a clean-handed bravo--otherwise there is
no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with
one servant, and sometimes an acquaintance, who latterly looks a
little queer in solitary bits of bushes."
The peril of violence may have been the greater because the Count could
not find a lawyer willing to take up his case; the advocates declining, as
one man, to act for him on the ground that he was either a fool or a
knave--a fool if he had been unaware of the liaison and a knave if he had
connived at it and "waited for some bad end to divulge it." The stiletto,
however, remained in its sheath, and the matter, after all, was settled in
the Courts. The Countess, supported by her family, applied for the
separation which she had previously resisted; and the Count, on his part,
resisted the separation which he had previously demanded, raising
particular objections to the claim that he should pay alimony.
But he had to pay it. The papal Court decreed a separation, fixing Madame
Guiccioli's allowance at £200 a year, but, at the same time, ordained with
that indifference to liberty and justice which distinguishes Churches
whenever they attain temporal power, that the wife whose injuries it was
professing to redress, should not be allowed to live with her lover, but
must either reside in the house of her parents or get her to a nunnery.
She went on July 16 to a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna. Byron
visited her there twice a month, but continued to occupy his hired
apartment in her husband's house--a fact which by itself sufficiently
justifies his reiterated protests that the manners and customs of Italy
are beyond the comprehension of the English. A letter to Moore dated
August 31 gives us his own view of his proceedings as well as of the
relations which he conceives to subsist between genius and disorder:
"I verily believe that nor you nor any man of poetical temperament can
avoid a strong passion of some kind. It is the poetry of life. What
should I have known or written had I been a quiet mercantile
politician or a lord-in-waiting? A man must travel and turmoil, or
there is no existence. Besides, I only meant to be a Cavalier
Servente, and had no idea it would turn out a romance in the Anglo
fashion."
So that we find Byron launched yet again on a new way of life--the last
before his final and famous transference of his energies from love to
revolutionary politics.
Evidently it was a relief to him to find himself a lover instead of a
cavaliere servente--even at the risk of having a dagger planted, on some
dark night, between his shoulder blades. Evidently, too, he loved "the
lady whom I serve" better than he had loved her at the beginning of the
liaison, and better than he was to love her towards the end of it. But,
even so, it was no absorbing love that possessed him--no love that
diverted his thoughts from morbid introspection, or made him feel that,
merely by loving, he had fulfilled his destiny and played a worthy part in
life. On the contrary he could write in the Diary which he then kept for
six weeks or so: "I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived
so long, and to so little purpose;" and he could compose the well-known
epigram:
_Through life's road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing--except thirty-three._
Nationalism, movements, risings, revolutions, and the rest of it might
well seem a welcome excitement to a man so _blasé_ and so inured to
sensations that love, though he vowed that he "loved entirely" could not
lift him to a more exalted frame of mind than that; and his attachment to
Madame Guiccioli may well have gained an element of permanence from the
fact that she belonged to a family of conspirators in league against
priests and kings.
CHAPTER XXVIII
REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES--REMOVAL FROM RAVENNA TO PISA
The origin of Byron's revolutionary opinions is wrapped in mystery. He
certainly was not born a revolutionist; there is no record of his becoming
one for definite reasons at any definite moment of time; and if it were
alleged that he assumed revolutionism for the sake of swagger and effect,
or had it thrust upon him by the household of the Gambas, the
propositions, though pretty obviously untrue, could not very easily be
disproved.
What he chiefly lacked in the character of revolutionist was the fine
enthusiasm of the men of 1789, their pathetic belief in the perfectibility
of human nature, and their zeal for equality and fraternity as things of
equal account with liberty. His view of human nature was thoroughly
cynical, and he was far too proudly conscious of his own place in the
social hierarchy to aspire to be merely citizen Byron in a world from
which all honorific distinctions had disappeared. Indeed we find him, in
some of his letters, actually gibing at Hobhouse because his activities as
a political agitator have brought him into contact with ill-bred
associates; and that, as will be admitted, is a strange tone for a sincere
revolutionist to take.
Nor was Byron ever an argumentative revolutionist of the school of the
philosophic Radicals. Neither in his letters nor in his other writings
does he give reasons for his revolutionary faith. He presents himself
there as one who is a revolutionist as a matter of course--one to whom it
could not possibly occur to be anything but a revolutionist. As for his
motives, he assumes that we know them, or that they do not concern us, or
else he leaves us to guess them, or to infer them from our general
knowledge of his character and circumstances.
Apparently, since guess-work is our resource, he was a Revolutionist in
Italy for much the same reason for which he had been a protector of small
boys at Harrow. The same generous instinct which had made him hate bullies
then made him hate oppressors now; and he hated them the more because he
perceived that oppression was buttressed by hypocrisy. In particular he
saw the Italians bullied by the Austrians in the name of the so-called
Holy Alliance--that unpleasant group of potentates whose fanaticism was
exploited by the cunning of Metternich, and who invoked the name of God
and the principle of divine right for the crushing of national
aspirations. That was enough to set him now sighing for "a forty-parson
power" to "snuffle the praises of the Holy Three," now proposing that the
same Three should be "shipped off to Senegal," and to enlist his
sympathies on the Italian side. The rest depended upon circumstances; and
the determining circumstances were that he was an active man on a loose
end, and that his lot was cast among conspirators.
He was ready to conspire because of the trend of his sympathies; he
actually conspired, in the first instance, partly to please the Gambas,
and partly because he was bored; and his appetite grew with what it fed
upon. It was not merely that conspiracy furnished him with occupation--the
cause at the same time furnished him with an ideal, of which he was
beginning to feel the need. Living for himself he had made a mess of his
life; and his relations with Madame Guiccioli did not conceal the fact
from him. His love for her was a pastime, and no more an end in itself
than his attachment to the draper's wife at Venice. But he felt the need
of some end in itself, unrelated to his personal concerns, to round off
his life, give it unity and consistency, and make it a progressive drama
instead of a mere series of unrelated incidents; and he found that end in
espousing the cause of oppressed nationalities.
No doubt there were other influences simultaneously at work. The most
effective altruist is always something of an egoist as well; and it is
likely enough that Byron heard the promptings of personal ambition as well
as the bitter cry of outcast peoples. His place in a revolutionary army
could not be that of a private soldier--he was bound to be its picturesque
figure-head if not its actual leader; and that meant much at a time when
all the Liberals of Europe closely followed every attempt to shake off the
Austrian, or the Prussian, or the Papal yoke. So that here was his clear
chance to rehabilitate himself--to issue from his obscure retreat in a
sudden blaze of glory, and set the prophets saying that the stone which
the builders rejected had become the head-stone of the corner. But,
however that may be, and however much or little that object may have been
present to his mind, it is at all events from the time of his active
association with revolutionary movements that Byron's life in exile begins
to acquire seriousness and dignity.
So much in broad outline. The details, when we come to look for them, are
obscure, insignificant, and disappointing. He joined the Carbonari, and
was made the head of one of their sections--the Capo of the Americani was
his official designation; but the Carbonari, though a furious, were a
feeble folk. They had signs, and passwords, and secret meeting-places in
the forest, and they whispered any quantity of sedition; but their secrets
were "secrets de Polichinelle." Spies lurked behind every door and
listened at every keyhole, and their intentions were better known to the
police than to themselves.
A rising was proposed and even planned. The poet's letters to his
publisher are full of dark references to the terrible things about to
happen. A row is imminent, and he means to be in the thick of it. Heads
are likely to be broken, and his own shall be risked with the rest. All
other projects must be postponed to that contingency. He cannot even come
to England as he had intended, to attend to his private affairs. And so
on, in a series of letters, in one of which we find the significantly
prophetic question, honoured with a paragraph to itself: "What thinkst
thou of Greece?" It is the beginning, at last, of the awakening of Byron's
sterner and more serious self--the first occasion on which we see the
fierce joys of battle clearly meaning more to him than the soft delights
of love.
Only there was to be no battle this time, and hardly even a skirmish, and,
in fact, very little beyond a scare. The Austrians were watching the
Romagnese border much as a cat watches a mouse-hole. A week or so before
the proposed insurrection was to have taken place, an Austrian army
crossed the Po, and the proposed insurgents scattered and hid themselves.
It only remained for the Government to arrest those of them whom it
desired to keep under lock and key, and expel those whom it preferred to
get rid of.
Byron himself might very well have been lodged in an Austrian or Papal
gaol through a scurvy trick played on him by some of the conspirators. He
had provided a number of them with arms at his expense; and then the
decree went forth that all persons found in possession of arms were to be
treated as rebels. Whereupon the chicken-hearted crew came running to the
Guiccioli Palace and begged Byron to take back his muskets. He was out at
the time, but returned from his ride to find his apartment turned into an
armoury; and it still remains uncertain whether he escaped molestation,
as he thought, because his servants did not betray him, or, as seems more
probable, because the Government preferred not to have such an
embarrassing prisoner on their hands.
If he would have been embarrassing as a prisoner, however, he was equally
embarrassing as a resident; and, as his expulsion might have made a noise,
it was decided to manoeuvre him out of the country by expelling the
Gambas. Where they went Madame Guiccioli would have to go too, and where
she went Byron might be expected to follow. We get his version of the
story, together with a glimpse at his feelings, and at the new struggle in
his mind between love and ambition, in a letter to Moore dated September
19, 1821;
"I am all in the sweat, dust, and blasphemy of an universal packing of
all my things, furniture &c., for Pisa, whither I go for the winter.
The cause has been the exile of all my fellow Carbonics, and, amongst
them, of the whole family of Madame G.; who, you know, was divorced
from her husband, last week, 'on account of P. P. clerk of this
parish,' and who is obliged to join her family and relatives, now in
exile there, to avoid being shut up in a monastery, because the Pope's
decree of separation required her to reside in _casa paterna_, or
else, for decorum's sake, in a convent. As I could not say, with
Hamlet, 'Get thee to a nunnery,' I am preparing to follow them.
"It is awful work, this love, and prevents all a man's projects of
good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as everything seems up
here), with her brother, who is a very fine, brave fellow (I have seen
him put to the proof) and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman
who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one's own
heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge
them."
Greece again, it will be observed, and an indication that Byron is at last
more anxious to be up and doing something as the champion of desperate
causes than to lie bound with silken chains about the feet of a mistress!
A proof, too, that his mistress, on her part, already perceiving that
causes may be her rivals, feels the need of working on his feelings with
her tears! Moore prints the letters in which she appeals to him in the
first excitement of her passions and apprehensions: "Help me, my dear
Byron, for I am in a situation most terrible; and without you I can
resolve upon nothing." She has received, it seems, a passport, and also an
intimation that she must either return to her husband or go to a convent.
Not suspecting that passport and intimation came from the same source, she
talks of the necessity of escaping by night lest the passport should be
taken from her. She is in despair, and cannot bear the thought of never
seeing Byron again. If that is to be the result of quitting Romagna, then
she will remain and let them immure her, regarding that as the less
melancholy fate. And so forth, in language which may be merely
hysterical, but more probably indicates a waning confidence in her lover.
But her tears prevailed. Byron, it is true, lingered at Ravenna for some
months after her departure; but that is a circumstance of which we must
not make too much. He had his apartment at Ravenna; he had his belongings
about him; and they were considerable, including not only furniture, and
books, and manuscripts, and horses, and carriages, and dogs and cats, but
a large menagerie of miscellaneous live-stock. He could hardly be expected
to go until he and the Gambas had arranged where to settle; and their
arrangements called for much discussion and balancing of pros and cons.
It was during the time of indecision that Shelley came, at his request, to
visit him; and we may take Shelley's letters to Peacock as our next
testimony to his way of life. His establishment, Shelley reports,
"consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, five
cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon;" and in a postscript he adds: "I find
that my enumeration of the animals in this Circæan Palace was defective,
and that in a material point. I have just met, on the grand staircase,
five peacocks, two guinea-hens, and an Egyptian crane." Then he proceeds:
"Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual
custom (but one must sleep or die, like Southey's sea-snake in
_Kehama_) at twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From
six till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna
from the sea. We then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till
six in the morning."
They gossiped about many things, and considered, among other matters, what
would be the best place for Byron, the Gambas, and Madame Guiccioli to
live in. Switzerland had been proposed, but Shelley urged objections which
Byron admitted to be sound. Switzerland was "little fitted for him." The
English colonies would be likely to "torment him as they did before,"
ostentatiously sending him to Coventry, and then spying on him when there.
The consequence of his exasperation might be "a relapse of libertinism," a
return to the Venetian way of life, "which he says he plunged into not
from taste, but from despair."
Perhaps the last-named danger was rather less than Shelley supposed; for
the drapers' and bakers' wives of Geneva and the Canton of Vaud are
neither so attractive nor so accommodating as those of Venice; but, on the
whole, this wayward sprite, as he is commonly esteemed--so wayward that he
had been expelled from his University and had sacrificed a large fortune
to an unnecessary quarrel with his father--showed common sense and worldly
wisdom in his advice. He showed so much of it, indeed, and showed it so
clearly, that Byron begged him to write to Madame Guiccioli and put the
case to her; which he duly did "in lame Italian," eliciting an answer
very eloquent of his correspondent's growing anxiety as to her hold upon
Byron's heart. Madame Guiccioli agreed to the proposal, but then begged a
favour: "Pray do not leave Ravenna without taking Milord with you."
But that, of course, was rather too much to ask. The most that Shelley
could promise was that he would undertake every arrangement on Byron's
behalf for his establishment at Pisa, and would then "assail him with
importunities," if these should be necessary, to rejoin his mistress; and
it seems that they were necessary, for two months or more later, we find
Shelley writing to him: "When may we expect you? The Countess G. is very
patient, though sometimes she seems apprehensive that you will never leave
Ravenna."
The Countess, indeed, in supplying Moore with biographical material,
showed herself at her wit's end to devise excuses for Byron's delay, not
too wounding to her vanity; and Shelley, at the time, showed a tendency to
reconsider his estimate of their relations: "La Guiccioli," he wrote in
October, "is a very pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian, who has
sacrificed an immense fortune for the sake of Lord Byron, and who, if I
know anything of my friend, of her, and of human nature, will hereafter
have plenty of leisure and opportunity to repent her rashness." It was a
harsh judgment, based in part, no doubt, on what Shelley had been told of
Byron's treatment of Miss Clairmont; but it indicated a real danger-spot.
Byron had ceased to love passionately, if he had ever done so, and he did
not love blindly. We need not, indeed, accept Miss Clairmont's statement
that, at the end, he was "sick to death of Madame Guiccioli," and that it
was chiefly for the purpose of escaping from her that he joined the Greek
insurgents. That utterance was the voice of a jealous woman endeavouring
to appease her own affronted pride. But though there was no question of
Byron's giving Madame Guiccioli a rival of her own sex, she was now
destined to encounter the rivalry, hardly less serious, of his political
interests and ambitions. All through the period of his residence at
Ravenna things had been working towards that conclusion; and the
circumstances of the removal showed how near they had now got to it.
"We were divided in choice," Byron wrote to Moore, "between
Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the
Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it
washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst
selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region
of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their
English visitors; for which reason, after writing for some information
about houses, upon hearing that there was a colony of English all over
the cantons of Geneva, &c., I immediately gave up the thought, and
persuaded the Gambas to do the same."
Which is true enough as far as it goes, but is something less than the
whole truth, since it omits to mention the increasing seriousness in
Byron's character, and his new tendency to transfer the bitterness of his
indignation from the authors of his own wrongs to the political tyrants of
the political school of Metternich.
Switzerland could afford no scope, in that direction, for his energies.
The Swiss, it is true, have their revolutions from time to time; but these
are petty and trivial. Strangers have a difficulty in understanding the
points at issue; and the interference of strangers is not solicited. The
revolutionist from abroad is only welcome in Switzerland when he is
resting, or when a price is put upon his head--neither of which conditions
Byron could claim to fulfil. In Italy, however, and over against Greece,
he would be in the midst of the most hospitable revolutionists in the
world; and his chance of passing from love and literature to fighting and
statesmanship was bound to come to him if he would wait for it.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE TRIVIAL ROUND AT PISA
From Ravenna to Pisa, from Pisa to Genoa, from Genoa to Cephalonia, from
Cephalonia to Missolonghi and an untimely death in a great cause still
very far from victory--these are the remaining stages of the pilgrimage.
We have a cloud of witnesses--Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Lady
Blessington, and others; but only the merest fragment of their long
depositions can be presented here.
The life at Pisa, where Byron at last arrived in November 1822, was, at
first, quite commonplace and uneventful. One reads of a trivial round of
functions rather than of duties punctually discharged at the same hour of
every day. Byron, we gather, lay late in bed, but ultimately rose, and ate
biscuits and drank soda-water, and received the visits of his English
acquaintances, and rode out with them to an inn, and practised shooting at
a mark, and then rode home again. After that came dinner, and a call upon
the Gambas, and an interview with Madame Guiccioli; and then, that
ceremony finished, the late hours of the night and early hours of the
morning were devoted, sometimes to conversation, but more often to
literary composition. That was all; and it would have seemed little
enough if the witnesses had not taken the view that, whatever Byron did,
he was giving a performance, and that whoever saw him do it was a
privileged spectator at a private view and under an obligation to report
the spectacle.
They did take that view, however, and devoted themselves, in the modern
phraseology, to "interviewing" Byron. He was so different from them--so
much greater--and so much more interesting--that they could no more
converse with him lightly, on common topics and on equal terms, than they
could so converse with a monster advertised as the leading attraction of a
freak museum. Shelley, indeed, might do so, being his friend as well as
his admirer, and one who moved naturally on the same plane of thought; but
the others could only approach him humbly from below, sit at his feet, and
talk to him about himself. After his back was turned, they might presume
to quiz and satirise--Leigh Hunt did so, and so, too, to a less extent,
did both Trelawny and Lady Blessington; but, at the time, they could get
no further than begging permission to ask questions.
The permission was always accorded. Byron had never seriously resisted the
doctrine that his private affairs were of public interest; and he had, at
this period of his life, completely succumbed to it. No topic was so
delicate that his interlocutors felt any obligation to avoid it. His
quarrel with Lady Byron; his adventures with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady
Oxford, his excursions into inebriety with Sheridan and Scrope Davies; his
losses at hazard with the dandies; the moral laxity of the Venetian
interlude; the placid pleasure which he found in his relations with Madame
Guiccioli: on all these topics he talked at large and at length whenever
any stray companion started them. His readiness thus to gossip with all
comers on his most intimate affairs is noticed somewhere by Hobhouse as
one of the gravest defects of his character; but very likely there was not
much else to talk about in that dull provincial town; and in any case
Byron did not invariably tell the truth.
Trelawny says that he delighted to "bam" those who conversed with him; but
that queer slang word has long since gone out of date. A more modern way
of putting it would be to say that he liked to "gas," having no
inconsiderable contempt for those who tried to pump him, and being more
anxious to tell them things that would astonish them than to supply them
with accurate information. Having left London in the days of the dandies,
he had taken some of the ideals of the dandies to Italy with him, though
he had coated them with a cosmopolitan veneer. He still liked to swagger
in the style of a buck of the Regency who spared neither man in his anger
nor woman in his lust and could carry any quantity of claret with heroic
lightness of heart. Or, at all events, he liked to swagger in that way
from time to time; though one can see, collating the confidences with the
letters, that there were also moments at which the mask was lifted and the
real man appeared.
But the real man was also a new man--or, at all events, a man whose
character was undergoing a radical transformation under the very eyes of
his friends. Shelley seems to have been the only one of them who perceived
the change--he is, at any rate, the only one who has recorded it. Byron,
he said, was "becoming a virtuous man;" and the expression may pass, and
may be regarded as confirmed by the testimony of the other companions, if
we do not give the word "virtue" too rigid an interpretation. The Venetian
libertinism had been left behind for ever. With it had been left the old
passions and the old bitterness, and the old lack of aim or of ambition to
do more than enrapture the women and rub the self-righteous the wrong way.
Byron, in fact, was becoming calm, tolerant, practical and
sincere--learning to look forward instead of backward--a man who was at
last ready, and even resolved, to make sacrifices in order to achieve.
Even his feelings towards Lady Byron and her family seem to have undergone
a change at about this time, though not a change which indicated any
probability of reconciliation. A little while before, at Ravenna, he had
composed two epigrams on the subject: one addressed "To Medea," on the
anniversary of his wedding:
"_This day of all our days has done
The most for me and you;
'Tis just six years since we were_ One
_And_ five _since we were Two!_"
and the second on hearing simultaneously that _Marino Faliero_ had failed
on the stage, and that Lady Noel had recovered from an illness which had
seemed likely to be fatal:
"_Behold the blessing of a lucky lot!
My play is_ damned, _and Lady Noel not._"
Now, at Pisa, we find him acknowledging the gift of a lock of his child's
hair, and writing to Lady Byron thus:
"The time which has elapsed since the separation has been considerably
more than the whole brief period of our union, and the not much longer
one of our prior acquaintance. We both made a bitter mistake; but now
it is over, and irrevocably so. For, at thirty-three on my part, and a
few years less on yours, though it is no very extended period of life,
still it is one when the habits and thought are generally so formed as
to admit of no modification; and as we could not agree when younger,
we should with difficulty do so now."
And also:
"Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on
yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things--viz.
that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet
again. I think if you also consider the two corresponding points with
reference to myself, it will be better for all three."
The letter, for whatever reason, was never sent; but it has, nevertheless,
its value as a document illustrative of Byron's ultimate attitude towards
the great blunder of his life. There is no renewal of love, and no desire
for the renewal of intimate relations; but, on the other hand, there is no
more angry talk about shattered household gods. Instead, there is a new
spirit of toleration. Byron recognises, at last, that Lady Byron has a
perfect right to be the sort of woman that she is--that she may even be a
woman of some merit, though on him her very virtues jar. So he takes the
tone of a man who parleys politely under a flag of truce; and then turns
and goes his way, a little disappointed perhaps, but on the whole
indifferent. He had thought it worth while to send Lady Byron messages
about the pleasure which he found in the company of the Venetian harlots;
but he sent her none about the charms of Madame Guiccioli. He had
travelled too far from her for that, and got too completely out of touch
with her, and acquired too many new interests which she did not share.
It should be added, however, that in many of his new interests Madame
Guiccioli herself hardly shared. She was a charming woman--almost exactly
the woman to suit him--pretty and plump and intelligent, and yet ready to
acquiesce in his habit of regarding her sex from the standpoint of an
Oriental Satrap. It gratified him to relapse into her society when
strenuous activities had tired him; for he found her restful as well as
amiable. But her affection was no substitute for those strenuous
activities; and his need for her love seems to have diminished as the
desire to assert and prove himself by doing something strenuous and
striking grew upon him. An eloquent fact is that, having suspended the
writing of "Don Juan" at her request, he presently resumed it--and that
though her objection to "Don Juan" was that it stripped the sentiment from
love; which indicates that, though he still loved her in his fashion, he
loved no more than he chose to, and certainly not enough to let his love
stand between him and any serious enterprise.
There are biographers, indeed, who doubt whether he would have been
willing to marry Madame Guiccioli if unexpected circumstances had enabled
him to do so; but, according to Lady Blessington, the irregularity of
their relations was a cause of great distress to him:
"I am bound by the indissoluble ties of marriage to _one_ who will
_not_ live with me, and live with one to whom I cannot give a legal
right to be my companion, and who, wanting that right, is placed in a
position humiliating to her and most painful to me. Were the Countess
Guiccioli and I married, we should, I am sure, be cited as an example
of conjugal happiness, and the domestic and retired life we lead would
entitle us to respect. But our union, wanting the legal and religious
part of the ceremony of marriage, draws on us both censure and blame.
She is formed to make a good wife to any man to whom she attaches
herself. She is fond of retirement, is of a most affectionate
disposition, and noble-minded and disinterested to the highest degree.
Judge then how mortifying it must be to me to be the cause of placing
her in a false position. All this is not thought of when people are
blinded by passion, but when passion is replaced by better
feelings--those of affection, friendship, and confidence--when, in
short, the _liaison_ has all of marriage but its forms, then it is
that we wish to give it the respectability of wedlock."
Such is the report, confirming the view that the ardour of Byron's passion
had by this time burnt itself out, and exhibiting him in the novel light
of a lover tired of love-making but desirous of domestication. The desire
does, at times, overtake even the most disorderly; and it is credible
enough that Byron had come to entertain it. He had entertained it once
before, on the eve of his marriage; and it is the kind of desire that
recurs even after the first experiments have proved unsatisfactory. So it
was with Byron, the wife, and not the estate of matrimony, being held
responsible for the failure; only the desire was not, in his case, the
ruling passion. That passion was to do something, and to be seen doing
it, the second condition being as essential as the first, in defence of
the victims of the Holy Alliance or any other tyranny.
It was a passion destined very soon to be gratified, the end coming in a
dismal swamp, but in a blaze of glory. We will tell the story--or as much
of it as needs to be told--in a moment; but we must first attend Byron a
little longer on the trivial round--riding out to the inn, and shooting at
a mark, and riding home again--in order that we may note how certain
deaths and other incidents aided and threw light upon the further
development of his character.
CHAPTER XXX
FROM PISA TO GENOA
It was while Byron was at Pisa that his natural daughter, the little
Allegra, died, after a rapid illness, of typhus fever at her Convent
School. He disliked her mother--we have noted the reasons why it was
hardly to be expected that he would do anything else--but he had viewed
the child as the gift of heaven, precious, though at first undesired. He
had played with her in his garden at Ravenna, and had made a will leaving
her £5000, and was at once too fond and too proud to make any mystery of
the relationship. All his friends, as well as his sister were apprised of
it, and received news, from time to time, of the child's physical and
moral progress. Nearly all of them were informed of her death. "It is a
heavy blow for many reasons, but must be borne--with time," he wrote to
Murray. "The blow was stunning and unexpected," he told Shelley. "I
suppose that Time will do his usual work--Death has done his." To Sir
Walter Scott he commented:
"The only consolation, save time, is that she is either at rest or
happy; for her few years (only five), prevented her from having
incurred any sin, except what we inherit from Adam."
He desired, too, that the child's relationship to him should be proclaimed
on a tablet to be set up in Harrow Church; but that was impossible owing
to the prejudices of the Vicar and Churchwardens. It seemed to them that
"every man of refined taste, to say nothing of sound morals," would
practise hypocrisy in such a matter. The Vicar wrote to Murray to say so,
and to ask him to point out to Byron that, in the case of ex-parishioners,
the Churchwardens had the power not only to advise hypocrisy but to
enforce it; and he enclosed a formal prohibition from one of them, running
thus:
"_Honoured Sir_,
I object on behalf of the parish to admit the tablet of Lord Byron's
child into the church.
"_James Winkley, Churchwarden._"
It was the pitiful performance of a clerical Jack-in-Office; and we will
leave it and pass on, merely noting that Byron, more than once, in
defining his duties to Allegra, affirmed and illustrated his own religious
position. One of his avowed reasons for not allowing her to be brought up
by her mother was that Jane Clairmont was "atheistical." For himself, he
said, he was "a very good Christian," though given to expressing himself
flippantly. The affirmation is confirmed by Shelley's description of him,
half playful and half-shocked, as "no better than a Christian," and by the
account of his opinions given by Pietro Gamba in a letter to Dr.
Kennedy--from which it appears that though Byron might, like his own Cain,
defy the God of the Shorter Catechism, he was profoundly reverent in his
attitude towards really holy things.
Count Pietro reports two conversations with him on these sacred matters;
the first talk taking place at Ravenna:
"We were riding together in the Pineta on a beautiful Spring day.
'How,' said Byron, 'when we raise our eyes to heaven, or direct them
to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of God? or how, turning
them inwards, can we doubt that there is something within us, more
noble and more durable than the clay of which we are formed? Those who
do not hear, or are unwilling to listen to these feelings, must
necessarily be of a vile nature.' I answered him with all those
reasons which the superficial philosophy of Helvetius, his disciples
and his masters, have taught. Byron replied with very strong
arguments, and profound eloquence, and I perceived that obstinate
contradiction on this subject, which forced him to reason upon it,
gave him pain."
Later, at Genoa, the subject came up again:
"In various ways I heard him confirm the sentiments which I have
already mentioned to you.
"'Why, then,' said I to him, 'have you earned for yourself the name of
impious, and enemy of all religious belief, from your writings?' He
answered, 'They are not understood, and are wrongly interpreted by
the malevolent. My object is only to combat hypocrisy, which I abhor
in everything, and particularly in religion, and which now
unfortunately appears to me to be prevalent, and for this alone do
those to whom you allude wish to render me odious and make me out
worse than I am.'"
Decidedly we have a more serious Byron there--a child becoming a man,
emerging from frivolity, and putting away frivolous and childish things;
and one gets the same impression of mental and moral evolution repeated
when one reads Byron's appreciation of Shelley, written under the shock of
the news of his sudden death--passages which it is a labour of love to
copy out:
"I presume you have heard that Mr. Shelley and Captain Williams were
lost on the 7th ultimo in their passage from Leghorn to Spezzia, in
their own open boat. You may imagine the state of their families: I
never saw such a scene, nor wish to see another. You were all brutally
mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the _best_ and
least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in
comparison."
"There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was
ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will,
perhaps, do him justice _now_, when he can be no better for it."
"You are all mistaken about Shelley. You do not know how mild, how
tolerant, how good he was in society; and as perfect a gentleman as
ever crossed a drawing-room, when he liked, and where he liked."
Those are the appreciations; and one quotes them, not for Shelley's sake,
but for Byron's, and because the power to appreciate Shelley's worth in
spite of his eccentricities is a test of character. His shining
spirituality cannot be perceived by the gross who are in bondage to the
conventions of ethics, politics, or religion, or by those, not less gross,
who are the slaves of their lusts. To love him was impossible except for
one who looked beyond the material to the ideal. It is so now, and it was
more especially so in his lifetime, when belief in his wickedness was
almost an article of the Christian faith. But Byron stands the test, and
his relations with Shelley are further proofs of his final progress
towards moral grandeur.
One cannot say the same of his relations with Leigh Hunt; but then Leigh
Hunt was a very different sort of person from Shelley; and his behaviour
towards Byron was peculiar. Invited to Pisa to arrange for the production
of a new newspaper or magazine, he arrived with a sick wife and several
children, with no visible means of support, and with the ill-concealed
intention of sponging up innumerable guineas from the stores of the
originators of the enterprise. The guineas were not refused to him. Byron
seems to have let him have about five hundred guineas in all, as well as
some valuable copyrights and board and lodging for himself and his family
on the ground floor of his own palace. He found the noisy children a
nuisance, however, and resented the desire to sponge; with the result that
relations were quickly strained, and the reluctant host and clamorous
guest regarded each other with suspicion and dislike.
One of Hunt's complaints was that the guineas, instead of being poured
into his lap in a continual golden shower, were doled out, a few at a
time, by a steward. Another was that there was a point in the palace which
no member of the household of the Hunts was allowed to pass without a
special invitation, and that a savage bull-dog was stationed there to
guard the passage. The former precaution was probably quite necessary, and
the latter charge is probably untrue; though, the palace being full of
bull-dogs, and the Hunt children being, as Byron said, "far from
tractable," one can readily imagine the nature of the incident on which it
was based. In any case, however, the essential facts of the situation are
that Byron, though he had once been sufficiently in sympathy with Hunt to
visit him when in prison, for calling the Regent a fat Adonis of fifty,
now found that he disliked him, and kept him at arm's length; while Hunt,
on his part, taking offence at the aloofness of Byron's attitude, avenged
himself by writing a very spiteful book, full of unpleasant truths not
only about Byron, but also about Madame Guiccioli.
The Countess, he says, did not know how to "manage" Byron. When he
"shocked" her, she replied by "nagging"--the prime offence, it will be
remembered, of Lady Byron herself. It was a policy which might have served
when she was in the full bloom of youth; but that happy time was passing.
She was beginning to look old and weary, and to go about as one who
carried a secret sorrow locked up in her breast. "Everybody" noticed the
change: "In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many
years. It is most likely in that interval that she discovered that she had
no real hold on the affections of her companion."
Assuredly if Hunt had nothing better to do in Italy than to take notes of
this character it was high time to pack him off home again; and packed off
he was, in due course, though not quite immediately. Before his departure
Byron had moved from Pisa to Genoa, driven to this further migration by
the fact that the Tuscan Government had in its turn, expelled the Gambas,
and that Madame Guiccioli, for reasons already explained, was once more
obliged to accompany them. If he had been as anxious to be rid of her as
Hunt hints, and Cordy Jeaffreson, leaning upon Hunt's testimony,
explicitly declares, here was his opportunity. He did not take it, but
accompanied her to her new home, where he was to live under the same roof
with her; one of Hunt's minor grievances being that he and his
children--described by Byron in a letter to Mrs. Shelley as "dirtier and
more mischievous than Yahoos"--were not admitted to the same boat with
them, but had to travel in a separate felucca. Afterwards there was some
talk of a further trip of the nature of a honey-moon--_solus cum sola_--to
Naples; but this, for whatever reason, did not take place, and Byron
remained at Genoa.
It was at Genoa that he met Lady Blessington, whose report of his regret
that there was no way of regularising his intimacy with Madame Guiccioli
we have already had before us. She and Leigh Hunt, if they do not
contradict each other at every point, at least give very contrary
impressions of the state of things. The difference may be due to the fact
that, whereas Leigh Hunt was borrowing money with great difficulty, Lady
Blessington was flirting with some success. Neither she nor Byron meant
anything by it. Count d'Orsay, no less than Countess Guiccioli, barred the
way to anything approaching attachment or intrigue. Lady Blessington only
flirted to flatter her vanity; Byron only for the purpose of killing time
and introducing variety into a somewhat monotonous life. Flirtation there
was, however, or at all events the semblance of it, and one may fairly
suppose it to afford a partial explanation of Countess Guiccioli's nagging
and martyred look, observed by Leigh Hunt's prying eyes. Indeed there are
passages in Lady Blessington's Journal which suggest as much, the passage,
for instance, in which Byron is reported as saying, not that he "was" but
that he "had been" passionately in love with the Countess; and then this
passage:
"Byron is a strange _mélange_ of good and evil, the predominancy of
either depending wholly on the humour he may happen to be in. His is a
character that Nature totally unfitted for domestic habits, or for
rendering a woman of refinement or susceptibility happy. He confesses
to me that he is not happy, but admits that it is his own fault, as
the Contessa Guiccioli, the only object of his love, has all the
qualities to render a reasonable being happy. I observed, _à propos_
to some observation he had made, that I feared La Contessa Guiccioli
had little reason to be satisfied with her lot. He answered: 'Perhaps
you are right: yet she must know that I am sincerely attached to her;
but the truth is, my habits are not those requisite to form the
happiness of any woman. I am worn out in feelings; for, though only
thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of
those nameless attentions that all women, but above all Italian women,
require. I like solitude, which has become absolutely necessary to me;
am fond of shutting myself up for hours, and, when with the person I
like, am often _distrait_ and gloomy.'"
A man does not talk like that to a woman with whom he has just become
acquainted unless he is flirting with her--albeit, it may be, giving her
to understand, while in the act of flirting, that his heart is too
withered to be long responsive to her charms. And that, it seems, at the
end of many love affairs, was Byron's final note. Even Madame Guiccioli
did not really matter to him, though he acknowledged obligations to her
and discharged them. Nothing mattered except one memory which, though it
could never be anything more than a memory, still haunted him. He lived
with that memory to the last, as we shall see. Being only a memory, and a
painful one, it was rather a stimulus to action than a hindrance to it.
But with the luxurious and uxorious love which does hinder action he had
done. Whether he was tired of it or not, he felt that it was unworthy of
him, and that life held nobler possibilities.
To an unknown lady who seems, at this date, to have offered him the free
gift of her love, he answered, pooh-poohing the proposition. He looked
upon love, he said, as "a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to
make or to break matches, but by no means a sinecure to the parties
concerned." He added that he regarded his own "love times" as "pretty well
over"; and so in fact they were. He needed a sharper spur than they could
give him, and a more heroic issue than they could involve, if, during the
few years left to him, he was to redeem the time and startle the world by
deeds of which it had not imagined him to be capable. The revolt in Greece
gave him his chance and he took it.
His sympathies, as we have seen, had long been enlisted on the Greek side,
as had also those of the Gambas. Now the London Greek Committee placed
itself in communication with him. "I cannot express to you," he wrote to
Edward Blaquière, "how much I feel interested in the cause, and nothing
but the hopes I entertained of witnessing the liberation of Italy itself
prevented me long ago from returning to do what little I could, as an
individual, in that land which it is an honour even to have visited." To
Sir John Bowring he added a significant detail: "To this project the only
objection is of a domestic nature, and I shall try to get over it."
He did get over it; and those who knew him best were confident that he
would; but the fact that Madame Guiccioli tried to detain him is to be
remarked as explaining a good deal. It explains why he did not care to
take her to Greece, or even to the Ionian Islands, with him, fearing lest
she should be a clog on his activities. It explains the comparative
coldness of the letters which he addressed to her from the scene of
action. It explains finally, if any explanation be needed, why hers was
not the memory which he chose to live with in the dismal swamp in which
his last days were passed.
And so off to Cephalonia with young Trelawny and Pietro Gamba.
CHAPTER XXXI
DEPARTURE FOR GREECE
A book might be written--indeed more than one book has been written--about
that picturesque last phase of Byron's life which dazzled the imagination
of mankind. Coming to it at the end of a book already long, one owes it to
one's sense of proportion to treat it briefly, noting only the outstanding
facts. The details, when all is said, are of small importance. What
matters is that here is an instance, almost unique in history, of a poet
transforming himself into a man of action, and proving himself a very
competent man of action, very sober and sensible, and quite free from the
characteristic vices of the poetical and artistic temperaments.
So far, though he had succeeded as a poet, Byron had failed as a man. The
one deep and sincere passion of his life had only made trouble for him;
and still more trouble had been made by his own violence, and vanity, and
faults of temper. Through them he had allowed himself to be manoeuvred
into a false position from which, in the bitterness of his indignation at
the injustice done to him, he had made no serious effort to escape.
Sitting in the midst of the wreck of his household gods, he had given
vent to his anger in winged words; while, at the same time, making the
persecution which he endured an excuse for sensual indulgence. Sensuality
had wrecked his health without yielding him any real satisfaction, and, of
course, without giving his censors any reason to reconsider their
disapproval. He understood now what a poor figure he would have cut, in
the eyes alike of his contemporaries and of future generations, if he had
died, as he so nearly did, in the days of his degradation, in the arms of
the baker's wife, or of some hired mistress. He understood, too, that he
was capable of greater things than any of these virtuous people who would
then have pointed the finger of scorn at him. He had thought to
demonstrate as much by his association with the Carbonari. It was not he
who had failed the Carbonari, but the Carbonari who had failed him. That
failure being however, through their fault and foolishness, complete, it
still remained for him to give his proofs, in a much more striking style,
in Greece.
Though he had but a poor opinion of his colleagues, he was thoroughly in
earnest about the cause. He had always hated bullying, and the Turks were
bullies. He was always at war with hypocrites--and it seemed to him that
an absolute government was an organised hypocrisy. It was not necessary,
therefore, for him to love revolutionists in order to be willing to help
them to work out their salvation; and he certainly did not love the
Greeks. It is recorded that he gave up keeping a diary because he found so
much abuse of the Greeks creeping into it; and he sometimes spoke of them
with excessive bitterness: "I am of St. Paul's opinion," he said, "that
there is no difference between Jews and Greeks, the character of both
being equally vile;" and his conduct, at the beginning of his expedition,
was somewhat of a disappointment to romantic people.
The eyes of romantic Europe were upon him, and far too much was expected
from the magic of his presence and his name. He would, at once, people
thought, raise an army and march to Constantinople. Arriving before
Constantinople, he would blow a trumpet, and the walls of the city would
fall down flat. "Instead of which," they complained, he had settled down
comfortably in a villa in the Ionian Islands, and was writing a fresh
canto of "Don Juan." But that was not true. Byron was, indeed, living in a
villa--for even a romantic poet must live somewhere; but the only poetry
which he wrote in his villa was a war song. For the rest, he was wisely
trying to master the situation before committing himself--refusing to stir
before he saw his way.
For the situation was, just then, far from satisfactory. Their initial
successes had turned the heads of the Greeks, and now their leaders were
at loggerheads. Each of them was anxious to secure Byron's help, not for a
nation, but for a faction, and to engage him, not in revolt against the
common enemy, but in internecine strife. As Finlay puts it:
"To nobody did the Greeks ever unmask their selfishness and
self-deceit so candidly.... Kolokrotones invited him to a national
assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordatos informed him that he would be of no
use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordatos was then in that island.
Constantine Metaxa, who was Governor of Missolonghi, wrote saying that
Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petra
Bey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to
save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds."
Trelawny, who was more keen about the fighting than about the cause,
accused him of "dawdling" and "shilly-shallying," and went off, without
him, to join the forces of one of the sectional chiefs.[12] Byron, just
because he took the revolution more seriously than Trelawny, sat tight.
His immediate purpose was to reconcile the rival factions, and raise money
for them. Pending the conclusion of a loan, he advanced them a good deal
of his own money, and those who imagined that he was merely out to see
sights and amuse himself, quickly discovered their mistake.
It was suggested to him, for instance, that as a man of letters, a
scholar, and an antiquary, he might be interested to visit the stronghold
of Ulysses. "Do I look," he asked indignantly, "like one of those
emasculated fogies? I detest antiquarian twaddle. Do people think I have
no lucid intervals, and that I came to Greece to scribble nonsense? I will
show them that I can do something better." On another occasion, when he
was taken to a monastery, and the Abbot received him in ecclesiastical
costume, with the swinging of odorous censers, and presented him with an
address of fulsome flattery, he burst into tempestuous rage, exclaiming:
"Will no one release me from the presence of these pestilential idiots?
They drive me mad."
It was at this time that the idea was mooted of electing Byron to be King
of Greece. A King would be wanted, it was said, as soon as the Turks had
been turned out, and no one would cut a nobler figure on the throne than
Byron. He heard what had been said, and smiled on the proposal. "If they
make me the offer," he wrote, "I will perhaps not reject it"; and one
feels quite sure that he would not have rejected it. To found a dynasty
and be privileged, as a royal personage, to repudiate Lady Byron and take
another wife, in order that the throne might have an heir--that would,
indeed, have been a triumph over the polite Society which had
cold-shouldered him and the pious people who had denounced his morals; and
there can be little doubt that Byron aspired to win it, and would have won
it if he had lived. He was very far, however, from stooping to conciliate
the electors with smooth words; in a State Paper, addressed to the Greek
Central Government, he lectured them severely:
"I desire the well-being of Greece and nothing else. I will do all I
can to secure it; but I will never consent that the English public be
deceived as to the real state of affairs. You have fought gloriously;
act honourably towards your fellow citizens and the world, and it will
then no more be said, as has been repeated for two thousand years,
that Philopæmen was the last of the Grecians."
The man of action spoke there; and the man of action also came out in
Byron's expressions of disdain for his colleague, Colonel Stanhope--the
"typographical colonel," as he called him--who maintained that the one
thing needful for the salvation of the Greeks was that they should "model
their institutions on those of the United States of America, and decree
the unlimited freedom of the Press." Byron knew better than that. He was
not to be persuaded that "newspapers would be more effectual in driving
back the Ottoman armies than well-drilled troops and military tactics." He
knew that fighting would be necessary, and he was awaiting his chance of
fighting with effect.
His chance came when Mavrocordatos, emerging from the ruck of
revolutionary leaders, arrived to raise the siege of Missolonghi, after
mopping up a Turkish treasure ship by the way, and invited Byron to join
him, placing a brig at his disposal for the voyage. "I need not tell you,"
he wrote, "to what a pitch your presence is desired by everybody, or what
a prosperous direction it will give to all our affairs." The
"typographical colonel," who was already with Mavrocordatos, wrote at the
same time: "It is right and proper to tell you that a great deal is
expected from you, both in the way of counsel and money ... you are
expected with feverish anxiety. Your further delay in coming will be
attended with serious consequences." Whereupon Byron, resolving at last to
take the plunge, wrote to Douglas Kinnaird, who was managing his affairs
for him in London: "Get together all the means and credit of mine you can,
to face the war establishment, for it is 'in for a penny, in for a pound,'
and I must do all that I can for the ancients." And so, with Pietro Gamba,
to the dismal swamp, where he was "welcomed," Gamba tells us, "with salvos
of artillery, firing of muskets, and wild music."
"Crowds of soldiery," Gamba continues, "and citizens of every rank,
sex, and age were assembled on the shore to testify their delight.
Hope and content were pictured in every countenance. His lordship
landed in a Spezziot boat, dressed in a red uniform. He was in
excellent health, and appeared moved by the scene."
Moved by the scene, indeed, he doubtless was. The scene was the beginning
of his rehabilitation in the eyes of those who had treated him with
contempt--the beginning of the proof that he had the qualities of a
leader, and could wield other weapons besides the pen--the demonstrative
proclamation that the path of duty was to be the way to glory. The scarlet
uniform was an appropriate tribute to the solemnity of the occasion on
which he formally entered upon his last and best new way of life. He did
not enter upon it, however, "in excellent health," as Gamba says, but as a
broken man with a shattered constitution, who had but a little time in
which to do his work before the inevitable malaria came up out of the
marsh and gripped him.
Meanwhile, however, Mavrocordatos gave him a commission as
commander-in-chief--archi-strategos was his grandiloquent title--and he
did what he could. He took 500 of those "dark Suliotes" whom he had sung
in the early cantos of "Childe Harold" into his pay, and was prepared to
lead them to the storming of Lepanto. He did something to mitigate the
inhumanities of the war by insisting upon the release of some Turkish
prisoners whom his allies proposed to massacre. Maintaining his character
as man of action, he suppressed a converted blacksmith, who arrived from
England with a cargo of type, paper, bibles and Wesleyan tracts, proposing
to use the tracts for cartridges and turn the type into small shot. And
then, having leisure on his hands, he wrote one poem, which he showed to
Colonel Stanhope, saying: "You were complaining the other day that I never
write any poetry now. This is my birthday, and I have just finished
something which, I think, is better than what I usually write."
I
"_'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move;
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!_
II
"_My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!_
III
"_The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze--
A funeral pile!_
IV
"_The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain._
V
"_But 'tis not_ thus--_and 'tis not_ here--
_Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor_ now,
_Where glory decks the hero's bier,
Or binds his brow._
VI
"_The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free._
VII
"_Awake! (not Greece--she is awake!)
Awake my spirit! Think through_ whom
_Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home._
VIII
"_Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!--unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be._
IX
"_If thou regret'st thy youth_, why love?
_The land of honourable death
Is here:--up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!_
X
"_Seek out--less often sought than found--
A soldier's grave, for thee the bed;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest._"
"We perceived," Count Gamba comments, "from these lines ... that his
ambition and his hope were irrevocably fixed upon the glorious objects of
his expedition to Greece, and that he had made up his mind to 'return
victorious or return no more.'" Readers who are better acquainted than
Count Pietro alike with the English language and with the circumstances of
the case will find rather more than that in them. They also reveal the
memory which Byron fell back upon and lived with at the hours when he
rested from the strain of his revolutionary enthusiasm. It was not the
memory of Count Pietro's sister. Byron could not possibly have been
thinking of her when he cried out that his love was a lonely fire at which
no torch was kindled; for her love for him was far fiercer and more
enduring than his love for her. His thoughts, it is quite clear, had once
more strayed back to Mary Chaworth; and the internal evidence of that is
confirmed by the mention of her name in two separate passages of those
"Detached Thoughts" which he threw on paper just before he left Ravenna.
His attachment to her, he then remembers, threw him out "on a wide, wide
sea." He speaks of her as "My M.A.C.," and continues in a passage often
quoted:
"Alas! why do I say _My_? Our Union would have healed feuds, in which
blood had been shed by our fathers; it would have joined lands broad
and rich; it would have joined at least _one_ heart, and two persons
not ill-matched in years (she is two years my elder);
and--and--and--what has been the result? She has married a man older
than herself, been wretched, and separated. I have married, and am
separated; and yet _we_ are _not_ united."
This last fact, indeed, may well have impressed him as the cruellest of
all. There had been two desperately unhappy marriages, and a shivering
and scattering of two sets of household gods; and yet he and she, through
whatever misunderstandings and scruples, had failed to set up their new
structure on the ruins. He, indeed, on his part, would have asked nothing
better than to be allowed to try that task of reconstruction; but she, on
hers, had been too good, or too weak, or too much under the influence of
well-meaning friends who believed the whole duty of woman to consist in
forgiving her husband and keeping up appearances. She had kept them up,
accepting martyrdom with a resignation worthy of a better cause than any
which her hard-drinking husband was capable of representing, believing
that she only sacrificed herself, and earning no gratitude worth speaking
of by doing so. But she had also sacrificed her lover.
He was one of those exceptional men who may do exceptional things with
impunity--and also one of those self-willed men who, having made up their
minds what is best, can never be contented with the second-best, but must
always be kicking against the pricks. Hence the stormy emotional career
through which we have followed him, and the many experiments, reckless but
half-hearted, with new ways of life; a reckless but half-hearted marriage;
reckless but half-hearted intrigues, first with the Drury Lane actresses,
and then with the Venetian light-o'-loves; a reckless but half-hearted
career as the _cicisbeo_ of an Italian nobleman's wife.
Two thoughts had been present to his mind through all these phases: the
thought in the first place that he owed it to himself to prove that he was
a better and a greater man than he had seemed to be, and to redeem the
mess which he had made of his life by some impressive action; the thought,
in the second place, of Mary Chaworth. We have seen the former thought
flashing out in a letter to Moore, who was probably one of the last men in
the world capable of understanding it. The latter thought is blazoned in
the letter written to Mary Chaworth in the midst of the Venetian revels,
and so absurdly asserted by Lord Lovelace to be a letter to Augusta Leigh.
It reappears, as we have seen, in the Detached Thoughts, and also in poem
after poem, from "The Dream" to the piece just cited. Evidently,
therefore, it was, indeed, the thought which Byron lived with--the thought
which, if not always with him, was always waiting for him when the
reaction following upon excitement made room for it. There would be no
escape from it until the hour when, as he put it, he looked around, and
chose his ground, and took his rest; and it only remains for us to picture
the last stormy scenes at the end of which rest was reached.
CHAPTER XXXII
DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE
The end was not to come, as Byron may have hoped, on the field of battle.
It was his health, as he had apprehended (though without, for that reason,
taking any special care of it) that was to fail him. An imprudent plunge
into the winter sea while on his way to Missolonghi had upset him; and
though he had temporarily recovered, he was in no state to resist the
pestilential climate of that dismal swamp. He knew it, and at the very
time when Stanhope was writing home that "Lord Byron burns with military
ardour and chivalry," he was keenly conscious, as his own letters show, of
the danger attending his residence in the most malarious quarter of a
malarious town.
"If we are not taken off by the sword," he wrote on February 5, "we
are like to march off with an ague in this mud basket; and, to
conclude with a bad grace better _marshally_ than _marti-ally_. The
dykes of Holland, when broken down, are the deserts of Arabia in
comparison with Missolonghi."
The risk, though inglorious in itself, was nevertheless the price of
glory; and he paid it willingly. He was, once more, as famous as at the
hour when "Childe Harold" had suddenly revealed his genius, and the fame
which he now tasted was of a worthier kind. Then he had dazzled and
fascinated. Now he enjoyed the love and admiration, not merely of idle
women, but of a whole people, and discovered that he had the power to heal
feuds and to lead men. He might, or might not, live to wear, or to refuse,
a kingly crown; but at least he had lived to be hailed as the Liberator of
a nation, and to be revered accordingly. An anecdote preserved by Parry,
the artificer who was serving under him in charge of the arsenal,
illustrates the adoration of the peasantry:
"Byron one day," Parry relates, "returned from his ride more than
usually pleased. An interesting country-woman, with a fine family, had
come out of her cottage and presented him with a curd cheese and some
honey, and could not be persuaded to accept payment for it. 'I have
felt,' he said, 'more pleasure this day, and at this circumstance,
than for a long time past.'"
Such was the homage paid to him, by the humble as well as the great; but
it soon became increasingly evident that though he had achieved the glory,
death was to rob him of the crown. He began to have epileptic seizures;
and in the midst of them, there was trouble with the Suliotes. There were
only five hundred of them, and they preferred the insolent claim that one
hundred and fifty of them should be promoted to be officers, and that the
rest should be accorded a month's pay in advance. Colonel Stanhope tells
us how he quelled the mutiny:
"Soon after his dreadful paroxysm, when he was lying on his sick-bed,
while his whole nervous system completely shaken, the mutinous
Suliotes, covered with dirt and splendid attire, broke into his
apartment, brandishing their costly arms, and loudly demanding their
rights. Lord Byron electrified by this unexpected act, seemed to
recover from his sickness, and the more the Suliotes raged, the more
his calm courage triumphed. The scene was truly sublime."
The mutineers suppressed, the doctors came and bled him. He pulled
through, whether in consequence of their treatment or in spite of it; but
his regimen and his mode of life were not such as to restore him to
vigour. He was sweeping away the coats of his stomach by large and
frequent doses of powerful purgative medicaments; and in the intervals
between the purges he partook freely of a comfortable and potent kind of
punch which Parry mixed for him. It is no wonder, therefore, that relapse
succeeded relapse and that just at that hour at which fortune seemed
beginning to smile upon the Greeks, his life could be seen to be ebbing
away.
On April 9, while riding with Gamba, he was caught in a violent storm of
rain. "I should make a fine soldier if I did not know how to stand such a
trifle as this," he said to his companion; but two hours after his return
he was shivering and complaining: "I am in great pain," he said to Gamba.
"I should not care for dying but I cannot bear these pains." On April 11,
he was well enough to ride again, but on the 12th, he was in bed with what
was diagnosed as rheumatic fever, and the fever never again left him. The
inevitable proposal to bleed him was repeated. At first he resisted, with
the usual talk about the lancet being more deadly than the sword, but in
the end he acquiesced. "There!" he said. "You are, I see, a d----d set of
butchers. Take away as much blood as you like, and have done with it."
They took twenty ounces of blood from him. It was an absurd treatment, and
probably hastened the end; but he had bad doctors, and even the good
doctors of these days knew no better. Moreover his constitution was
shattered. He was falling to pieces like an old ruin, and it is doubtful
whether the wisest treatment could have saved him. There was a further
rally, however, and Gamba, who was laid up in an adjoining apartment with
a sprained ankle, hobbled in to see him. "I contrived," he writes, "to
walk to his room. His look alarmed me much. He was too calm. He talked to
me in the kindest way, but in a sepulchral tone. I could not bear it. A
flood of tears burst from me, and I was obliged to retire."
Soon after this, the final delirium set in. His attendants stood by his
bedside weeping copiously. They could not, says Cordy Jeaffreson
cynically, have wept more copiously "if there had been a prize of a
thousand guineas for the one who wept most." Afterwards he was alone, at
one time with Parry, and at another time with Fletcher; and of his last
articulate words there is more than one account. It is told that he spoke
of Greece: "I have given her my time, my money, and my health--what could
I do more? Now I give her my life." It is told that he gesticulated
wildly, as if mounting a breach to an assault, and calling, half in
English, half in Italian: "Forward--forward--courage--follow my
example--don't be afraid." It is told again that he stammered
unintelligible messages to Lady Byron and to his sister.
But all that matters little. What matters is, not Byron's last utterance,
but his last action, now that neither love nor lust, nor despair, nor
bitterness, nor sloth, nor self-indulgence, held him any longer in
unworthy bondage. For he had died in the act of redeeming the many wasted
years, and of fulfilling the prediction of his most degraded time, that,
in spite of everything, he would come to achievement at last--not merely
the literary achievement which was compatible with the life of a trifler
and a man of pleasure, but the more glorious achievement which is only
possible to those who consent to sacrifice their ease and make a free gift
of their energies to a cause which they perceive to be greater than
themselves.
APPENDIX
BYRON'S LETTER TO MARY CHAWORTH
VENICE, _May 17, 1819_
MY DEAREST LOVE,
I have been negligent in not writing, but what can I say? Three years'
absence--and the total change of scene and habit make such a difference
that we have never nothing in common but our affections and our
relationship. But I have never ceased nor can cease to feel for a moment
that perfect and boundless attachment which bound and binds me to
you--which renders me incapable of _real_ love for any other human
being--for what could they be to me after _you_? My own ... we may have
been very wrong--but I repent of nothing except that cursed marriage--and
your refusing to continue to love me as you had loved me. I can neither
forget nor _quite forgive_ you for that precious piece of reformation, but
I can never be other than I have been--and whenever I love anything it is
because it reminds me in some way or other of yourself. For instance, I
not long ago attached myself to a Venetian for no earthly reason (although
a pretty woman) but because she was called ..., and she often remarked
(without knowing the reason) how fond I was of the name. It is
heart-breaking to think of our long separation--and I am sure more than
punishment enough for all our sins. Dante is more humane in his "Hell,"
for he places his unfortunate lovers--Francesca of Rimini and Paolo--whose
case fell a good deal short of _ours_ (though sufficiently naughty) in
company; and though they suffer, it is at least together. If ever I return
to England it will be to see you; and recollect that in all time, and
place, and feelings, I have never ceased to be the same to you in heart.
Circumstances may have ruffled my manner and hardened my spirit; you may
have seen me harsh and exasperated with all things around me; grieved and
tortured with your _new resolution_, and soon after the persecution of
that infamous fiend who drove me from my country, and conspired against my
life--by endeavouring to deprive me of all that could render it
precious--but remember that even then _you_ were the sole object that cost
me a tear; and _what tears_! Do you remember our parting? I have not
spirits now to write to you upon other subjects. I am well in health, and
have no cause of grief but the reflection that we are not together. When
you write to me speak to me of yourself, and say that you love me; never
mind commonplace people and topics which can be in no degree interesting
to me who see nothing in England but the country which holds _you_, or
around it but the sea which divides us. They say absence destroys weak
passions, and confirms strong ones. Alas! _mine_ for you is the union of
all passions and of all affections--has strengthened itself, but will
destroy me; I do not speak of physical destruction, for I have endured,
and can endure, much; but the annihilation of all thoughts, feelings, or
hopes, which have not more or less a reference to you and to _our
recollections_.
Ever, dearest,
INDEX
Albrizzi, Countess, 300, 302
Allegra, Byron's natural daughter, 272, 345-346
Bankes, William, 150
Becher, Rev. John, 44, 50
Benzoni, Countess, 300, 302-303
Bessborough, Lady, 148
Blessington, Lady, 336-337, 342, 352-353
"_Bride of Abydos, The_," 170
Broglie, Duc de, 265
Byron, Admiral Lord, 6
Byron, Augusta. _See_ Leigh, Augusta
Byron, Captain George, the poet's cousin, 209, 226
Byron, Captain, "Mad Jack," the poet's father, 6-7, 10-11
Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord, ancestors, parents, and hereditary
influences, 1-9;
childhood and schooldays, 10-22;
schoolboy love affairs, 23-34;
life at Cambridge, and flirtations at Southwell, 35-49;
revelry at Newstead, 50-62;
the "grand tour," 63-74;
flirtations in Spain, 70-74;
meeting with Mrs. Spencer Smith, 74-86;
at Athens, 87;
swims the Hellespont, 94;
return to England, 101;
death of his mother, 101;
publishes "_Childe Harold_," 103-111;
recollections of Mary Chaworth, 114-126;
infatuation of Lady Caroline Lamb, 128-145;
acquaintance with Lady Oxford, 148-155;
renewed relations with Mary Chaworth, 164-181;
Marriage with Miss Milbanke, 182-193;
disagreements, 194-207;
Lady Byron demands separation, 208-226;
scandalous accusations against him, 226-252;
departure for the Continent, 253;
acquaintance with Miss Clairmont, 256-263, 271-273;
at Geneva, 264-276;
in Italy, 277 _et seq._;
moral decline, 280-298;
in the Venetian salons, 300;
attachment to Countess Guiccioli, 302-328;
revolutionary activities, 324-335;
life at Pisa and Genoa, 336-355;
enlists in the Greek cause, 356-373;
illness and death, 369-373
Byron, John, Lord, 2
Byron, Lady, wife of the poet, marriage, 192;
disagreements, 194-207;
demands separation, 208-226;
scandalous admissions, 226-252;
mentioned, 339-341, 373. _See also_ Milbanke, Anna Isabella
Byron, Mrs., the poet's mother, 10-17, 28, 31, 37-38, 42, 51, 101
Byron, Richard, Lord, 2
Byron, Sir John, of Claydon, 1
Byron, "the wicked Lord," 4-6, 12, 15
Byron, William, Lord, 3
Canning, Sir Stratford, 96-98
Carlisle, Lord, 15-17, 58, 60-61
Carmarthen, Marchioness of, 6
Chateaubriand, Vicomte de, 64-66
Chaworth, Mary, 25, 27-34, 114-126, 156-157, 159-160, 164-181, 248-250,
310-311, 366-368, 375-376
Chaworth, William, 4
"_Childe Harold_," 65-66, 102-111, 120
Clairmont, Jane, 256-263, 269-273, 284, 334, 346
Clermont, Mrs., 209, 219
Cogni, Margarita, 289-291
Cordova, Admiral, 69
Dallas, 103-105, 110
Davies, Scrope, 39, 118, 228, 255
"_Don Juan_," 297, 342
Duff, Mary, 23
"_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_," 59-62
Forbes, Lady Adelaide, 166, 184
Galt, John, 71-74, 83, 98, 105-106
Gamba, Pietro, 362
Gifford, William, 152
Godwin, Mary, 257, 260, 263, 269-271, 273
Guiccioli, Count, 302, 306, 313-321
Guiccioli, Countess, 233, 302-323, 330-332, 336-337, 341-343, 350-355
Hanson, Charles, 150-152, 216, 219
Harness, Rev. William, 119, 127, 135
Hervey, Mrs., 265
Hobhouse, John Cam, 66, 68, 72, 87, 99, 153, 189-190, 208-209, 213, 218,
219, 221, 228, 255, 274, 277-278
Hodgson, 118-119, 123-124, 127, 144, 152, 216, 218, 228, 246
Holland, Lady, 132
Holland, Lord, 221
Hoppner, Consul-General at Venice, 288, 304, 307, 316-317
Horton, Wilmot, 224
"_Hours of Idleness_," 21
Houson, Anne, 45
Hunt, Leigh, 228, 336-337, 349-352
Hutchinson, Colonel, 3
Jersey, Lady, 227-228
Kemble, Fanny, 141
Lamb, Lady Caroline, 106-107, 128-145, 146-147, 245
Lamb, William, afterwards Lord Melbourne, 128-131, 133-135, 142-143,
145-147
Lauriston, General, 76
Leigh, Medora, 177
Leigh, Augusta, 7, 37, 151-152, 155, 174-175, 197-199, 209, 212-213,
216, 219, 222-223, 234-252, 274, 291, 373
Lovelace, Lord, 206, 218, 235-240, 249-252
Lushington, Dr., 214, 217, 245-246
Macri, Theresa, 88-91
"_Manfred_," 297
Mardyn, Mrs., 256
Mavrocordatos, 359, 361, 363
Medwin, 96, 138, 140-141, 144, 160-161, 195, 336
Melbourne, Lady, 128, 185-186, 221
Melbourne, Lord. _See_ Lamb, William
Milbanke, Anna Isabella, afterwards Lady Byron, 128, 155, 182-192
Milbanke, Sir Ralph, afterwards Noel, 191
Moore, Thomas, 123-124, 127, 131-132, 152, 154-155, 168, 184, 228, 315,
334
Morgan, Lady, 132
Murray, John, 151-152, 319, 346
Napoleon I., 75-77
Noel, Sir Ralph, 211, 214-216, 219. _See also_ Milbanke, Sir Ralph
Oxford, Lady, 148-157
Parker, Margaret, 25-26
Pedley, Mrs., 93-94
Robertson, Rev. F. W., 237, 251
Rogers, Samuel, 127, 131-132, 135-136, 228, 254
Salvo, Marquis de, 76-82
Segati, Marianna, 280-284, 287, 288-290
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 257, 260-261, 263-264, 269-271, 273, 293,
331-332, 336-337, 339, 348-349
Shipman, Thomas, 3
Sligo, Lord, 99
Smith, Florence Spencer, 74-86
Staël, Madame de, 162, 166, 264-265
Stanhope, Lady Hester, 95-96
Stendhal, 277-278
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 233-239, 246
"_Thyrza_," 121
Trelawny, 336-338, 359
Webster, James Wedderburn, 289, 293
Webster, Lady Frances, 158
Werry, Mrs., 91
Westmorland, Lady, 265
Williams, Captain, 348
Williams, Hugh W., 88-89
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] One of the heads of the family was born before his father's marriage,
but he was subsequently given a title on his own merits.
[2] In Mr. Murray's latest edition of "The Letters and Journals."
[3] He would have preferred Oxford, but there was no set of rooms vacant
at Christ Church.
[4] They intoned underneath his windows the supplication: Good Lort,
deliver us!
[5] Musters took his wife's name when he married her, though he afterwards
resumed his own.
[6] In "Byron: the Last Phase."
[7] Afterwards the Rev. William Harness, and a popular preacher.
[8] Sir Ralph Milbanke had taken the name of Noel on succeeding to some
property.
[9] For the full text of the letter see Appendix.
[10] It is doubtful whether Shelley was at Marlow at this date, so that
Miss Clairmont's memory of the place of meeting was probably at fault.
[11] Southey, among others, circulated the scandal.
[12] Odysseus, who was in Attica.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Love Affairs of Lord Byron" ***
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